[jatrax]

Yes it does and the solution to that problem is to become a better photographer so you can take less images to get the end result.

+1 I still have a bad habit of taking 2 or 3 extra shots just in case. Then on the computer I sit there trying to figure out which of the 4 completely identical shots is the best. I guess the good thing is that my skills have improved to the point that I could only take the one shot and be confident I got it. But I still take too many. And 24mp files are not something to casually leave laying about your hard disk.

[jsherman999]

Yes it does and the solution to that problem is to become a better photographer so you can take less images to get the end result.

Maybe the end goal is to keep increasing MP until we can only fit 36 exposures on a 128GB card. Back to old school, pick your shots very carefully.

[todd]

Maybe the end goal is to keep increasing MP until we can only fit 36 exposures on a 128GB card. Back to old school, pick your shots very carefully.

as long as the increases are feeding the IQ lust and we can still lower the res for s/pray.

[RGlasel]

I'll add my 2 cents regarding resolution and display size. Just because someone builds a 110 inch TV or a 50 MP digital camera, doesn't mean there is a market for it, beyond bored rich people. Digital technology has brought the cost of taking a picture and showing it to someone else to the absolute minimum value, namely zero. How many pictures are viewed on a display smaller than a 4x6 print? Look at the typical size of a photo posted on Facebook. It could be programmed to fill your monitor, instead you get something small enough to be viewed on a smartphone. How much dynamic range or sharpness can you appreciate on your phone? The effect on society of all this is that any image of higher quality than a phone camera shot is a work of craftsmanship, just like woodworking or quilting.

Excellent woodworkers can sell pieces that they make, a very select few with good business sense can even make a living at it, but most modern woodworkers do it solely for their own benefit. There are lots of woodworking tools for sale, so there is a viable market beyond furniture manufacturers and home renovation contractors. In fact, tool manufacturers probably make more money from amateur woodworkers than professionals. I think the camera market is very similar. No one buys a phone camera, it comes for free with the phone, so the mass market is looked after. For the craft market, there are more choices than you can shake a stick at. Buyers of better-than-phone cameras have to make a decision on which format gives them the greatest reward for the amount of disposable income they have. There is no new technology in FF digital cameras that isn't available in APS-C or any other interchangeable lens camera. Since there is no leap of technology required to build FF digital cameras, a manufacturer already producing DSLRs in other formats can easily enough add a FF camera to their lineup, if it makes business sense to them.

Consumers of images can't tell if a picture was taken with a FF camera or an APS-C camera, but they can tell the difference between a point and shot and a DLSR. However, when the consumers of images can't tell the difference between DLSR formats, professional photographers can produce marketable images with less than a FF camera. Some people want the very best, regardless of the cost, but how long are photographers taking pictures for their own benefit going to keep spending the extra money for FF? In the near term, Ricoh can produce a FF camera without a major capital investment, so it doesn't take a huge number of customers to justify adding a new FF camera, but in the long term, the FF market can only be headed in one direction. Bigger cameras and lenses are more expensive to manufacture, so FF will never have a cost advantage over other ILS cameras. New camera technology can be just as easily added to other formats as FF, so we will never see a resurgence in FF because of technological advances. So yes, FF digital cameras will die, but it may not be in my lifetime.

[philbaum]

At the same time, manufacturers are going to want to keep the $1000+ price point, and they're going to want to get aps-c and smaller DSLR/MILC shooters to stay on a body upgrade path, so they're going to bring FF down to the $1000, $1500 point to do that. Upper-end aps-c (especially DSLR) gets squeezed when that happens.

What does that portend for a company (Pentax) who's trying to sell lenses for an aps-c DSLR mount? (hint: bad things... unless they're selling FF at the time.)
.

There's this wise saying about there being 3 kinds of problems facing individuals:
A. The first type are those problems one can directly control.
B. The second type are those problems one can influence but not Control
C. The third type are those problems one has no ability to control or influence.

The wise advice says that a person should spend most of their time working on A type problems, and less time on Categories B and C - i didn't say none :-)

You have a rational logical discussion item - i'm just not sure that the camera world is going to play out that way. In other words - you may be right or you may be wrong. I'm not going to worry about this situation because right now i have the camera equipment that suits me. If it comes down to the situation, as you predict, that i can't buy an adequate APS camera in 2020 or before, then i'll do something else, perhaps even buy a FF. But why jump a hurdle before the horse has even got to it :-)

In the meantime, i choose to spend my time on things i can directly control. Not having a adequate printer was adversely impacting the number of prints i could sell. So i bought a new Epson printer which will help my sales far more than a FF body. In other words, it was a Category A type problem.

[Rondec]

People are going to have the same aversion to taking selfies with any DSLR, not just FF. When they see a deficiency in their phone, they'll be looking to add a real camera for those times, and they will be more willing to spend $1000+ to do so if there's a large delta between a 2020 phone and a 2020 camera. FF gives that large delta.

Think of it this way - assuming you upgraded from a P&S to a DSLR at some point in the past, why did you do so? Those same upgrade reasons will exist in the future, and people are not going to necessarily want to upgrade to a camera that barely trumps their (probably realy good, by 2020) camera phone - they're going to want to see a real upgrade in quality and performance if they're going to spend the money.

At the same time, manufacturers are going to want to keep the $1000+ price point, and they're going to want to get aps-c and smaller DSLR/MILC shooters to stay on a body upgrade path, so they're going to bring FF down to the $1000, $1500 point to do that. Upper-end aps-c (especially DSLR) gets squeezed when that happens.

What does that portend for a company (Pentax) who's trying to sell lenses for an aps-c DSLR mount? (hint: bad things... unless they're selling FF at the time.)


.

I don't know the future. What I hear from a lot of people is that they (hope) think that the future will be very much like the present, but better. That means SLRs with better sensors, faster auto focus, better optical viewfinders and cheaper. This, of course, is what Pentaxians really want, because they are both cheap (bargain hunters) and traditional. It is also what Canon/Nikon are hoping for, because they are firmly entrenched in those markets.

Cheap full frame versus upper end APS-C is a tough one, mainly because Canon/Nikon have chosen not to upgrade their flagship APS-C cameras. There is no 7D MK II or D400. Even though there are many Canon and Nikon users who would really like one. The closest are the D7100 (which has several flaws) and the K3 (made by a small camera company and not marketed particularly well) and by all accounts, they are selling well. For many purposes (sports, macro, wildlife), having an APS-C camera with a higher frame rate is better/cheaper option than getting a full frame camera. That is assuming that the internals -- auto focus and tracking are up to spec.

Canon and Nikon obviously want to sell as many full frame bodies as possible, because they make a lot on their full frame glass. That's fine. But it doesn't necessarily mean that the future is what they want it to be.

[jsherman999]

There's this wise saying about there being 3 kinds of problems facing individuals:
A. The first type are those problems one can directly control.
B. The second type are those problems one can influence but not Control
C. The third type are those problems one has no ability to control or influence.

We may be trapped into these choices... but Ricoh is not.

And I think the world is (sometimes literally) littered with companies who's philosophy mirrored #3. I don't want Pentax to join them.

.

You have a rational logical discussion item - i'm just not sure that the camera world is going to play out that way. In other words - you may be right or you may be wrong. I'm not going to worry about this situation because right now i have the camera equipment that suits me. If it comes down to the situation, as you predict, that i can't buy an adequate APS camera in 2020 or before, then i'll do something else, perhaps even buy a FF. But why jump a hurdle before the horse has even got to it :-)

The hurdles exist now, and Ricoh should be preparing to jump them. 2020 is not a hurdle, it's a finish line.

.

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Last edited by jsherman999; 01-04-2014 at 06:58 AM.

[MadMathMind]

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.

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.

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.

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.

[jsherman999]

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.

Something I think everyone should remember: Any detriment tied to "too large of files" for a consumer device is always, always, temporary.

Storage expands, buffers get bigger and better, processing power increases and everything gets cheaper. Moore's law only affects some of this, and only partially.

[Uluru]

Digital life is a life full of uncertainties an possibilities, and as long as our culture and society insists that the digital is the future of communication, the uncertainties and uneasiness will be parts of our lives if we insist that imaging should be done through just one or two possible ways.

So I guess the future will see a variety of cameras with variety of sensors, not just a few. Last thing we need in a cross-polinated and multi-variable society is just one standard, just one imaging sensor to rule them all. In terms of digital, it's a ludicrous thought, and that is the thought that for some reason analysts and columnists cling to blindly. I think they are crazy.

They want to see some "key to resolve all this imaging mess" but do not realise that it is exactly the variety of approaches that makes digital imaging so suddenly popular.

My concern is only in that many seem to forget that imaging sesnor alone means nothing if the non-digital part of the camera — the lens — is rubbish. Many have grown prejudices against small sensors because the optics made for them was always wanting. But in my case that has changed forever since Pentax introduced the Q.

IITLS (It Is The Lens, Stupid), not the sensor size alone, and if the optics is well made, the entire society has even more fertile ground to introduce various sensor sizes, as the quality of optics may alleviate the need for larger sensors in many walks of life and need for large systems. In some walks of life the sensor size may be required for whatever specialist reason, but in most practical terms, it's finally the optics that defines the final size of our imaging system and the quality of reproduction.

Long live the variety and a total cacophony of imaging sensor sizes! We need them all, as they are just one variable in the very complex equation, NOT the result of the equation.

[PJay]

I don't buy it. Full frame, maybe. But the same mounts with the same SLR format, no way. SLRs will live on in some super-specialized situations, but EVFs will take over eventually -- probably long before 2020 and I imagine even Nikon will read the writing on the wall and when they release their mirrorless full frame cameras, they will do it with a different mount.

Whatever the case, while sensor cost comes down, the price of good glass continues to climb.

Finally, I think the biggest argument is the "good enough" argument, which is that getting people to buy interchangable lens cameras when their cell phone is adequate for their needs is going to be tough. People want something they can take selfies with. Can you do that with your D800, even if you had connectivity? Of course not. Their will always be dedicated cameras, but I really don't buy the fact that most of the market is looking for full frame -- either from a cost or, a size stand point -- certainly not if you keep the SLR form factor.

Yes it does and the solution to that problem is to become a better photographer so you can take less images to get the end result.

Totally agree....but just don't use the 8fps. Or get yourself a medium format so that you are forced to get it right the first time for your 1 x image every 1.1seconds.

I don't buy it. Full frame, maybe. But the same mounts with the same SLR format, no way. SLRs will live on in some super-specialized situations, but EVFs will take over eventually -- probably long before 2020 and I imagine even Nikon will read the writing on the wall and when they release their mirrorless full frame cameras, they will do it with a different mount.

I read this statement with interest on "Digital Photo School" (that's where I belong by the way..);

"If you have lots of glass from the film days, it might be worth looking into a full frame body. Modern Nikon bodies are compatible with nearly every lens Nikon ever made, and Canon bodies all work with EF glass."

If this is statement is true....Then I can't see Nikon changing its mounts. That would 'appear' to be corporate suicide!

FF will live. Acoustic drums and guitars were out the door in the 80's in favour of the synthesiser.

Both the D7100 and K3 are a gimmick. 24MP on a cropped sensor?? Look at what a 16mp full frame sensor on the D4 can produce. It's night and day. And yes..I also understand that the price is also night and day. The title of this post is "FF will die out, except....."
....Except in Pentax land where FF is already dead!

[NickLarsson]

So this guy used his 16 MP APS-C X100s for a 80 feet x 18 feet billboard. Who needs to print bigger than this ?





Fuji X100S in Commercial Use @ Mark Kitaoka PhotographsMark Kitaoka Photographs

[RonHendriks1966]

So this guy used his 16 MP APS-C X100s for a 80 feet x 18 feet billboard. Who needs to print bigger than this ?

Well that is one off the issues, there is no pressing need for more and more pixels with current technics for large printing.

[wildman]

I'll wait until they come out with a "Salgado" and/or "Edward Weston" mode.
Failing that perhaps flawless performance at IS0 25000 or so.

Other than that I'll muddle along with what I have for the foreseeable future.

[philbaum]

So this guy used his 16 MP APS-C X100s for a 80 feet x 18 feet billboard. Who needs to print bigger than this ?

Fuji X100S in Commercial Use @ Mark Kitaoka PhotographsMark Kitaoka Photographs

Nick - thanks for posting that - what a lovely image.

But you must have made a mistake in the details, surely a FF? Thanks for the laugh!