Originally posted by Lowell Goudge For years, people argued that the reason for full frame was to reduce noise. That has essentially died with sensor improvements, to now an insistence on being able to have better artistic control and a narrowe depth of field with fast lenses. To me that argument is even less justified, it can be completely controlled by careful control of the setup at the onset. What it means is that to get the same impact with APS-C sensors you simply do not shoot the same way as you would with full frame, not that the shots can't be done.
The amount of sour grapes over Pentax's failure to release a FF body never ceases to amaze me. People will find whatever justification they need to rationalize Pentax's failure to meet this market segment.
No, not everyone needs full frame, but you're dismissing the benefits of full frame simply because Pentax doesn't offer one. The second Pentax offers a FF body posts like these will disappear forever.
The only way to achieve similarly shallow depth of field is to change the composition of the picture. If you back up and use a longer lens you will get less apparent depth-of-field. This is not possible in all situations. Similarly the only way to replicate the natural field-of-view is a telecompressor. It also provides an absolute advantage in megapixel counts, but more importantly it avoids the very low diffraction limits that are coming with the increased megapixel counts on modern crop sensors.
Quote: Full frame is not the be all and end all. It is promoted by camera companies that did not compete in medium format in the film era.
You really don't know what you're talking about. It's a dubious theory to start with since only two companies presently make FF cameras, not exactly a huge sample size, but it doesn't even hold up on that limited basis.
Nikon certainly manufactured medium format lenses, some of them with extremely high reputations. For example Bronica and the Plaubel Makina used Nikkor lenses. They were also heavily into large-format lenses, Nikkor-W and -SW types remain some of the best LF lenses available, and offer some solutions that simply don't exist outside of their lineup (the Nikkor-T interchangeable-cell lenses).
e: And both Contax and Kodak had their own medium format lineups. Contax is still one of the better ones out there, and some of the Kodak lineup is really the stuff of legends. I didn't realize they had put out FF bodies too.
I'm not even sure what your implication is supposed to be, that because they didn't make MF cameras it proves that larger sensors aren't better?
This entire post SCREAMS "I didn't want that full frame anyway".