Originally posted by leonsroar M:
There are customers who believe in that the size of image sensor ultimately equal to camera’s quality and other factors are not so important. In Australia, recently, I was told by one of customers that the size of image sensor represents whole quality of the camera, FF is the best.
T:
It sounds similar to faith in engine size and horse power among auto industry as well as faith in number of pixels on image sensor among camera industry.
M:
I agree. (as a case study), in audio industry, there were discussions centering power output rather than sound quality and it led to simply sound power race. Sound quality should be discussed in terms of sound quality and/or depth but the power race actually happened. After the race ended not meaningfully, manufacturers who focused on power started facing hard time and the small others who kept focusing on quality survived. Having experienced that (note: Murano used to work for Sony), I feel it (note: FF vs APS-C) is not a long-lasting discussion.
T:
Sounds interesting. It can be applied for digital camera industry.
M:
So, we have to be careful about rough discussion of FF vs APS-C even though number of pixel is of course important matter. We’d like to keep on focusing color depth and tenderness of image quality.
I thought that this part of the interview was particularly interesting. I'm a long-time Apple fan, and the hand-wringing that I see in this forum is very reminiscent of the anxiety that I used to see in Apple forums during Apple's lean years. We (forum members) thought that we understood Apple's needs better than Apple did -- and we were wrong. I thought that Steve Jobs' first few moves were ludicrous, but we all know how his reign panned out.
So the insider's view at Ricoh/Pentax is that current trends in imaging are repeating movements that we've seen in audio a decade or so ago. And perhaps they're right. I certainly appreciate the ongoing prioritising of "color depth and tenderness of image quality". When I shoot alongside other people with other brands of cameras, it seems to me that the images I get have a rich, full-blooded character that other brands seem to have trouble matching.
Consumer audio has been marked by an obvious decline in massive stereo systems that dominate lounge rooms. Contemporary systems are expected to be much sleeker, and to integrate well with video systems. So perhaps FF cameras are bit like these big old hi-fi systems. They do the job well, but they're big, clunky, and expensive. Consumers will gravitate towards less intrusive and demanding alternatives, so long as the quality is there. We've already seen a boom in cell phone imaging, despite the obvious IQ differential.
Having said that, it still seems to me that larger-format systems will always retain an edge in quality. Larger-format systems produce images that have a look that many people (myself included) find desirable. This just seems to come down to physics.
But this IQ difference is already relatively small, and likely to become less important over time. It probably is a safe bet that the future of enthusiast photography is in systems that are more compact, flexible and inexpensive than current FF systems.
Similar reasoning would seem to apply to the MF market. I've thought for some time that the way for Ricoh/Pentax to make a splash in high-end amateur/low-end pro market would be to develop something akin to a Leica S2 at an affordable price, with 645 compatibility via an adaptor. I haven't held much hope that such a product would manifest any time soon, if ever, but I'm starting to wonder if it's such an unrealistic thing to hope for after all. It would seem to fit well with Ricoh/Pentax's vision of the future, being substantially more compact and flexible than existing MF systems. But the possibility of delivering such a system at a reasonable price is by no means clear.