[normhead]

But in the years ahead if we can come up with some 4x5 camera backs, then an FF will be exactly what it was when it was created, a very limited system for shooting on the go, but no one with time to set up will ever use one. The current FF fad is completely a factor of the high cost of sensors. An anomaly of a single point in time. You might be able to envision a time when FF is king, but why stop there? In my fathers day, 6x6 images were the tourist cameras, I still have his old Ricohflex, and I have many images taken with it... this tendency to see FF as some kind of end point is puzzling.

I also remember it going the other way, when everyone of note was shooting 8x10, FF was some kind of portable compromise that no one would ever use for any kind of professional work... but would be good for news photographers who were too lazy to lazy to use a 5x7. I have a photo taken of myself playing football with a new man using a 4x5 view camera. I saw the guy setting up o the sideline, and had the good luck to make a hard cut right in front of him on the way to a touchdown. In those days serious meant at least 4x5. I'll never wrap my head around 35mm as some kind of be all and end all. That doesn't mean it can't happen. Stranger things happen all the time, it just means I'd find it odd.

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Last edited by normhead; 01-02-2014 at 01:42 PM.

[scratchpaddy]

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.

That's a logical argument, but people don't buy things logically. They want it. They buy it. Logic doesn't enter the picture until they have to explain it to the wife afterwards.

Do you see the trend? Always moving toward smaller and more convenient. Even pro cameras have gone that same direction. Not as fast, but still small and convenient. We never go back to large and bulky, always towards small and convenient. There are still 16x20 cameras and there are still people using them. But not many.

I agree completely. Whoever can pack "good enough" into the smallest, most convenient package is going to be making all the money. Big sensors don't fit that shoe. User friendliness always trumps picture quality for the vast majority of customers.

I don't care if my camera's big, and I have to carry a big bag around. I want the best pictures I can get, even at the expense of convenience, but compared to everybody else, I'm the odd one out.

[jsherman999]

But in the years ahead if we can come up with some 4x5 camera backs, then an FF will be exactly what it was when it was created, a very limited system for shooting on the go, but no one with time to set up will ever use one. The current FF fad is completely a factor of the high cost of sensors. An anomaly of a single point in time. You might be able to envision a time when FF is king, but why stop there? In my fathers day, 6x6 images were the tourist cameras, I still have his old Ricohflex, and I have many images taken with it... this tendency to see FF as some kind of end point is puzzling.

Oh, absolutely. I'l be first in line for an affordable, 4x5 based system.

And if people are willing to hold up full-sized ipads to take shots, they should try to make 'compact' 4x5 cameras that would sell well - most of the size of the camera would be in encasing the huge sensor, and if there's no mirror the register distance could be small. It would be like shooting an ipad with a coffee cup strapped on the front - very manageable for the IQ it delivered!

[redrockcoulee]

Oh, absolutely. I'l be first in line for an affordable, 4x5 based system.

And if people are willing to hold up full-sized ipads to take shots, they should try to make 'compact' 4x5 cameras that would sell well - most of the size of the camera would be in encasing the huge sensor, and if there's no mirror the register distance could be small. It would be like shooting an ipad with a coffee cup strapped on the front - very manageable for the IQ it delivered!

Travelwide 4X5 Travelwide 4×5 camera by Wanderlust Cameras — Kickstarter with interchangeable sensors that are made by Kodak, Fuji, Fomopan, Ilford etc.

I would have ordered one if I still had one of the two Angulon 90 6.8 lenses I used to own. But what is the point in that much detail if you are not on a tripod to take advantage of it?

My view is the current digital camera system is unsubstainable and that goes for each and every format. Companies depend on selling large volumes and that works when there is a notable improvement with each upgrade but that is not happening anymore. How many people are satisfied with their 8 to 12 Meg P&S that they are not upgrading to the 14 Meg ones? Or upgrading from the very last old model of Pentax, Nikon or Canon dslr to the newest one for the marginal increase in qualitly or ability for the vast majority of shooters? I have the feeling that much of the decreasee in sales of any one format is that current owners are satisfied with what they have and are using their money to buy some thing else probably not photography related. Even for photographers that are more serious just how much better does the next model need to be for many of us to upgrade from the current one (not that I have the most current or highest end model but that is because much of my shooting is done in MF or LF instead).

I am not sure what the future will be but I do not think it involves an ever growing number of customers buying each or even ever second upgrade the same as the car makers do not depend on everyone upgrading to this year's CIvic or 3 series or F150 etc. The same can be said for computers, much of the loss in sales is not from tablets but from people not needing to upgrade as often or from those who decided that a tablet and their older computer is better than upgrading their desktop.

Having said that I am also not a person who bought Apple or Harley Davidson shares just before they took off either

[RonHendriks1966]

Well the photographic market is changing rapidly since we can all go to large store and buy a fantastic camera for a small budget. Images are just for screens these days. I have a 27inch screen for my computer with 2560x1440 pixels and that screen is basicly still the standard for large resolution screens since 2010 and no-one is investing in anything more fancy. My brother has a small computerbussiness and he almost never sells any screens these days and mostly cheaper once when a screen breaks.

So where is the market going?
- well that one inch sensor is going to smartphones or something.
- aps-c is keeping the larger market for hobby and enthousiast (with or without mirror)
- full frame is growing, but not taking over the market, simply because the expenses are big while the market for selling images is shrinking

Why is aps-c the biggest market? Because the system from Samsung is made for aps-c!

[Pioneer]

Travelwide 4X5 Travelwide 4×5 camera by Wanderlust Cameras — Kickstarter with interchangeable sensors that are made by Kodak, Fuji, Fomopan, Ilford etc.

I would have ordered one if I still had one of the two Angulon 90 6.8 lenses I used to own. But what is the point in that much detail if you are not on a tripod to take advantage of it?

My view is the current digital camera system is unsubstainable and that goes for each and every format. Companies depend on selling large volumes and that works when there is a notable improvement with each upgrade but that is not happening anymore. How many people are satisfied with their 8 to 12 Meg P&S that they are not upgrading to the 14 Meg ones? Or upgrading from the very last old model of Pentax, Nikon or Canon dslr to the newest one for the marginal increase in qualitly or ability for the vast majority of shooters? I have the feeling that much of the decreasee in sales of any one format is that current owners are satisfied with what they have and are using their money to buy some thing else probably not photography related. Even for photographers that are more serious just how much better does the next model need to be for many of us to upgrade from the current one (not that I have the most current or highest end model but that is because much of my shooting is done in MF or LF instead).

I am not sure what the future will be but I do not think it involves an ever growing number of customers buying each or even ever second upgrade the same as the car makers do not depend on everyone upgrading to this year's CIvic or 3 series or F150 etc. The same can be said for computers, much of the loss in sales is not from tablets but from people not needing to upgrade as often or from those who decided that a tablet and their older computer is better than upgrading their desktop.

Having said that I am also not a person who bought Apple or Harley Davidson shares just before they took off either

I don't think I agree with the opinion that digital systems are not sustainable. Digital is here and will continue to be the primary method of taking pictures. There will continue to be a small subset of consumers and pros who use film because they like it, but most will continue to work with digital.

What is not sustainable is the consumer market that depends on continual upgrades to support the companies selling the products. We cannot continue to buy, use, then toss it out in two or three years when we rush to buy the next big thing which is promoted as being so much better.

[redrockcoulee]

I don't think I agree with the opinion that digital systems are not sustainable. Digital is here and will continue to be the primary method of taking pictures. There will continue to be a small subset of consumers and pros who use film because they like it, but most will continue to work with digital.

What is not sustainable is the consumer market that depends on continual upgrades to support the companies selling the products. We cannot continue to buy, use, then toss it out in two or three years when we rush to buy the next big thing which is promoted as being so much better.

Guess I should have used a different word but I meant the marketting or culture of continous upgrading of cameras to maintain sales. I did not mean that film will come back in any meaningful way, it has made a comeback sufficient for new products to come out and that is fine with me. But judging from your second paragraph we are in full agreement, just I did not say it well enough

[K David]

When everyone has one of these in their living room, the a one-inch sensor won't seem so great for video.

[K David]

But what is the point in that much detail if you are not on a tripod to take advantage of it?

Actually, I think that without a tripod it should be okay. I can hand-hold a WA lens on my SF or MF cameras to about 1/30th. If I can hand-hold this down to 1/60th, that still leaves me a decent range of hand-held speeds on most shutters. Plus, with the near-nothing movement of most leaf shutters, this should be okay to hand-hold to 1/30th. For most purposes, that should be just fine.

[Pete_the_Irish_Guy]

First off let me say I am in full agreement that excellent photos can be taken in all formats, film and digital (including instagram and diana's). I'd also argue that current full 135 format digital sensors out perform the analog 135 counterpart (detail, speed, shutter rate, and overall ease of use) so that comparison is moot. Maybe if Leica didn't use it and 135 died out digital slr makers would view apsc as the 'ideal' size. I don't know enough about lens design to determine if that's the case. What's been pointed out by the OP, 135 is the current "standard" in the digital market, the majority of which is held by Canikon. The best lenses in their lineup play to the full frame. Will it shift to apsc is the question.

Forgive me for stating the obvious but there needs to be both. A sports or wildlife photographer will need an excellent apsc sensor with a high frame rate and enjoy the len's 'sweet spot' (being a canon person I still think the 1D should have a 1.3x crop). Someone who doesn't need the reach, wants a bit less DOF and bigger pixels (which correlates to better low light performance and less diffraction) will choose a "full 135 frame" camera. At the moment medium format decreases your frames per second and exponentially increase your cost with no high ISO benefit due to the CCD sensors- which is a good thing.

Bigger in many ways does = better. Smaller in many ways = better.

Pentax can skip the full 135mm format. I wouldn't buy a pentax "full frame". Would you? I would buy a 645D priced competitively to the D800E though.

edit: and yes I agree 100% about the consumer culture not being sustainable. My digital system is an old first generation EOS 5D. It's showing it's age but I'm planning 2 more years of ownership before upgrading. For a camera that'll be 10 years old this year I think that's pretty impressive in this digital age.

[richard balonglong]

Predictions about a certain thing will die out are always there every year... Blogs and articles about "FF will die out" has always been written several times since that past years, yet, full frames still exists and Sony even added up...
I've been an APS-C user ever since, it's great, but I've outgrown it basing from what I need and want for my images, and I know a lot of enthusiasts are also moving up to full frame... These evidences are enough to step on those blogs and articles...

[Clavius]

Forgive me for stating the obvious but there needs to be both. A sports or wildlife photographer will need an excellent apsc sensor with a high frame rate and enjoy the len's 'sweet spot' (being a canon person I still think the 1D should have a 1.3x crop). Someone who doesn't need the reach, wants a bit less DOF and bigger pixels (which correlates to better low light performance and less diffraction) will choose a "full 135 frame" camera. At the moment medium format decreases your frames per second and exponentially increase your cost with no high ISO benefit due to the CCD sensors- which is a good thing.

Well said. All enthusiast and professional shooter aim for a system (or systems) that fits their own set of compromises. Be it budget, mobility, style of shooting, etc... Or a combination of those.

Bigger in many ways does = better. Smaller in many ways = better.

+100

Pentax can skip the full 135mm format. I wouldn't buy a pentax "full frame". Would you?

I think I would, despite already having multiple FF sytems. But I can't really tell untill it exists. Pentax does a terrific job at APS-C and MF, so I'd be very interested to see what kind of FF they would bake.

I would buy a 645D priced competitively to the D800E though.

Oh yes, that would be my choice too, I don't care much about size, but budget is one of my compromises. This is never going to happen though.

[Lurch]

Being a) nothing more than an enthusiastic amateur, and b) having moved to FF; I'll only add this:
- For me - complete waste of time.
- If I was doing professional-level landscape, then yeah; ok.

[wpvv]

But in the years ahead if we can come up with some 4x5 camera backs, then an FF will be exactly what it was when it was created, a very limited system for shooting on the go, but no one with time to set up will ever use one. The current FF fad is completely a factor of the high cost of sensors. An anomaly of a single point in time. You might be able to envision a time when FF is king, but why stop there? In my fathers day, 6x6 images were the tourist cameras, I still have his old Ricohflex, and I have many images taken with it... this tendency to see FF as some kind of end point is puzzling.

I also remember it going the other way, when everyone of note was shooting 8x10, FF was some kind of portable compromise that no one would ever use for any kind of professional work... but would be good for news photographers who were too lazy to lazy to use a 5x7. I have a photo taken of myself playing football with a new man using a 4x5 view camera. I saw the guy setting up o the sideline, and had the good luck to make a hard cut right in front of him on the way to a touchdown. In those days serious meant at least 4x5. I'll never wrap my head around 35mm as some kind of be all and end all. That doesn't mean it can't happen. Stranger things happen all the time, it just means I'd find it odd.

Good to remember that indeed, but there are a couple of things that should be mentioned also: wanting to have large(r) cameras in the past had a lot to do with the quality of the prints.
What is the kind of output that you want when taking/making photographs? For most people APSc sensor cameras will deliver here, even better than 6x6 tourist cameras in the 60'ies.


OTOH, photography is not only about output, but the joy of the process as well. 4x5 cameras might be a very nice experience indeed for many!

[Clavius]

OTOH, photography is not only about output, but the joy of the process as well. 4x5 cameras might be a very nice experience indeed for many!

That's a very personal opinion that that varies from person to person. Rationally only the output lasts, and the enjoyment of the photographer can't be seen in the delivered images. Especially for professionals the enjoyment (or lack of it) definitely should never influence the quality of their work.