Originally posted by jatrax But, if I understand the argument correctly the need for FF is going to be driven by the adoption of 4k monitors. Hmm, makes sense but is that going to happen? How many people are going to buy a new, big, expensive monitor so that their pictures look worse; requiring them to buy a new, bigger, expensive camera and lenses just to get back to the image quality they already had? I'm not seeing that happen any time soon, at least not within 5 years.
While we here have great understanding of how pixels work and what all that stuff means, most consumers only rudimentarily understand it. They get that more pixels can mean a better image, but they don't quite know how or why. Look at when 1080p first came out. People bought it listening to the marketing that it would be a lot better than their 720p TVs. In many cases, it wasn't. They bought too small a screen for their seating distance, so the better image quality couldn't be seen.
It's more like: "This monitor has higher resolution, it's better!" So people buy them. And then they find out that it doesn't work like they thought. That's more of what I meant.
Originally posted by jsherman999 Well said about the need for 4K and it's influences, but the above is proving to be wrong. Nikon sold around 30,000 D800's alone per month in 2012 - only a small fraction of that goes to 'professionals.' FF DSLR is now largely an 'enthusiast' market.
I have no evidence to support it, but I suspect people doing this are ones who were minimally invested or had intended to go to FF all along. If you have a kit lens or purchased FF compatible lenses thinking forward a few years, it's no issue to move up. If you have lots of APS-C only lenses, then it's an expensive upgrade. Some people will make that, but the longer people invest in APS-C, the harder it becomes for them to move out.
Originally posted by Pioneer What I think that most forget is that people are already taking pictures all the time with little tiny sensors inside their smartphones, and they are happy with it because they can quickly and easily post that picture for their friends to see. For now it is about the quick and easy connectivity, not the overall quality of the picture.
Throughout history convenience has always triumphed over quality.
Once digital became good enough then suddenly pocket digital cameras became the norm. Oh there were also other formats, APS-C and then full frame (35mm again.) But it was the ubiquitous pocket digital that ruled.
Now, the smartphone has replace the pocket digital.
Do you see the trend? Always moving toward smaller and more convenient.
What we're likely to see is DSLRs take advantage of "smaller." Obviously, there's two things they can't fix: lenses (limited by the physics of optics) and sensor size. Right now, the average smartphone has way more processing power than even the most powerful SLR. Smartphones can use average optics and make up for it with fancy signal processing, something we don't see on SLRs, probably because SoC are too expensive to mix with the necessary expensive components. As tiny processors become more cheaper and more powerful, we may see SLRs move to become a bit smaller--at the very least, they will become a lot more advanced.
OLED technology may help a lot. Those screens can be made flexible, so we may see larger fold-up screens incorporated into SLRs in time. That would make doing photo manipulation on them a whole lot easier. Right now, it's a nightmare. I never touch most of it. I see the features as ads for the provided software or designed for people who don't have computers. (Hard to use a digital camera without one, but I guess they could exist?)
The mirrorless systems kinda tried this, but they don't look like expensive, fancy cameras. Let's not forget that status symbols are very important. If a $1000 camera looks like a $100 one, people are reluctant to believe it's good and don't want to spend the money for something they don't think will impress.
Originally posted by Biro 24mp is actually something that might prevent me from buying the K-3. Yes, I know, I can shoot at lower resolutions. But then there is even less reason to buy the K-3.
Well, of course you can have the camera make JPEGs that are smaller, but you're always stuck with larger RAW files, if you choose that path.