[Rondec]

I would bet my house that every manufacturer has loads of market research saying otherwise.

The only time it consistently doesn't work that way is if the item in question is a Veblen good, or has other market characteristics that cameras/tech don't tend to have. Price drives markets, yields drive prices.



This is only true if current-gen pixel density supports it. For example, aps-c had no 'reach' advantage at all over the D800 until the 24MP sensors started coming out, because you could just crop the D800 image 1.5x and get the exact same image the D7000/K5 would produce. Once the 54MP FF sensors appear, 24MP loses that ground back again.

Do you think aps-c is going to 36MP? (it very well might, but think about what that starts to imply about diffraction limitations, etc.)

The problem is that full frames with these sorts of files have really slow frame rates. The K3 kills the D800 when it comes to frame rate -- what 3 fps versus 8, or something like that? They are very different tools and if you were planning to consistently crop to APS-C size any way, you would just take an APS-C camera out.

[bxf]

This exact same test was done in the Olympus form on dpreview, m43 vs. aps-c, and few could tell the difference there as well. Why do we need aps-c, if this is the case, Norm? m43 is just as good and can be made smaller (and presumably somewhat cheaper,) right?

The answer is because at anything less than ideal shooting conditions, aps-c can give better images with existing lenses. It just can. Sometimes those differences don't matter to a lot of folks who buy m43 cameras, and a lot of those m43 buyers would be willing to come into a forum and argue with you that your K3 does not give any significant IQ advantage over an entry-level, modern m43 body at regular display sizes.

Are they right? Is there a reason to continue to buy aps-c DSLR in a m43 or smaller MILC world when excellent lenses are available for them?

(rhetorical questions aside, my thinking for a while has been that the best photography combo to own would be m43 MILC + FF DSLR. Covers everything brilliantly.)

.

I rather liked the above comment. Can't argue with that. But then...

So your theory rests on the need to take pictures in bad conditions. The problem being that pictures taken in bad conditions are often bad pictures. Many of us just avoid taking pictures in bad conditions. My favourite pictures are all pictures that make full use of the DR available which means shooting 100 ISO to 400. To me your argument is that better cameras take better bad pictures. That's not really an argument I can relate to.

I would slightly paraphrase Norm's comment and say that photos taken in bad conditions rarely end up particularly noteworthy, so why bother trying to make them better?

Both valid arguments.

[mikemike]

I think Ricoh is using the economic advantages of APS-C to line the pockets of the distribution channel and line their pockets. Either that or they are preemptively leading the way in price hikes.

Earlier this week I was evaluating the economics of my hobby and did some competitive shopping to see what the landscape looks like.


If you shoot only primes, it could be cheaper to go with Canon or Nikon FF:


Weight is scaling nicely with camera size but it is clear that everyone other than Canon and Nikon are trying to squeeze profits out to make up for volume (or Canon and Nikon are locked in a competitive standoff that prevents them from hiking prices). I think Sony is trying to employ premium pricing in their lenses to give their system an air of exclusivity while employing aggressive pricing on their bodies to sell a lot of cameras stuffed with sony parts.

The way I see it is that the smaller the sensor size the faster the product cycles. With camera phones you see new ones being launched weekly and all the vendors are refreshing their top of the line products on an annual or more frequent basis. With compact dedicated cameras you see each vendor releasing a couple products every few months. As you move up to larger sensor sizes, the product cycles go up as well you see new APS-C cameras every 12-18 months and you see new FF cameras every 18-30 months and medium format taking even longer cycles than that.

If you had a MF, FF, and APS-C released all at the same time you would see that the performance scales as you would expect but after about a year, a new APS-C would come out that closes most of the gap between the old APS-C and the still current FF. Then you would see the FF come out that closes most of the space between the old FF and the still current MF.

[ElJamoquio]

I would slightly paraphrase Norm's comment and say that photos taken in bad conditions rarely end up particularly noteworthy, so why bother trying to make them better?

Both valid arguments.

Are sunsets bad conditions? Early twilight? Maybe. Do they end up noteworthy? Absolutely.

Are indoor pics bad? Maybe. Do they end up noteworthy? One of the few ways to make money consistently in photography...

[Paul MaudDib]

I think Ricoh is using the economic advantages of APS-C to line the pockets of the distribution channel and line their pockets. Either that or they are preemptively leading the way in price hikes.

Earlier this week I was evaluating the economics of my hobby and did some competitive shopping to see what the landscape looks like.
Attachment 201394

If you shoot only primes, it could be cheaper to go with Canon or Nikon FF:
Attachment 201398

This is kind of a dumb comparison because you're taking the top-of-the-line everything for Canon/Nikon which distorts the price horribly. Pentax simply doesn't make ultra-high-end pro gear, so it's not fair to compare their prosumer level gear to high-end pro gear. Particularly since, as everyone here complains, the models are refreshed so frequently for so little change. Since it's not fair to compare new gear directly to a used lens I'll throw in a more expensive figure for a used lens, with a warranty.

I know Canon the best, so let's take them as an example. You budget for a 24-70 II, a brand new lens that just came out and offers extremely marginal utility over the 24-70. If we drop that to a used copy of the original, you knock $1200-1400 off the price (KEH EX+ and BGN condition with 6mo warranty, $1100 and $900 respectively). You do the exact same thing with the 70-200 f/2.8 IS II. If you go with a 70-200 f/2.8 IS in EX condition, you knock $1050 off that price ($1450). If you go with BGN, you're down to $1230, knocking a total of $1250 off your price.

So with the conservative figures, that's $2250 you can knock off the Canon setup with no real loss in quality. That puts you at $5920, which is less than your Pentax setup. Yes, if you let your eyes get the better of you and decide to buy the very best anything money can buy, your ceiling is certainly higher in a pro system.

[normhead]

Are sunsets bad conditions? Early twilight? Maybe. Do they end up noteworthy? Absolutely.

Are indoor pics bad? Maybe. Do they end up noteworthy? One of the few ways to make money consistently in photography...

It depends doesn't it. They can be good mementoes of an important family event or a capture of a point in time, which is something different than good pictures but still important. My buddy used to go to charity golf tournaments and take picture of foursomes as people came of the course, then rush the pictures to a photofinisher to present at the tournament banquet. Horrible pictures in bad light, but people paid 25$ for a 5 by 7, and he'd sometimes make a $1600 in a weekend.. A sunset is god light. I shoot sunsets at 100 ISO. If you're shooting at the lowest ISO setting, meaning lowest noise highest DR you've got good light. If you have to go to a higher ISO you're sacrificing noise performance and Dynamic Range... so not good light. That's not the definitive definition, but it should provide some things to consider.

And of course the worst light is high noon, with it's dark shadows and ridiculous contrast. For some reason, many tourists think this is the time to take the vacation pictures they insist on sharing, to the detriment of us all.

[rbefly]

If you're shooting at the highest ISO setting, meaning lowest noise highest DR

Norm, I think you should edit this to 'lowest' ISO? Or, best, highest quality, etc.
Ron

[mikemike]

This is kind of a dumb comparison because you're taking the top-of-the-line everything for Canon/Nikon which distorts the price horribly. Pentax simply doesn't make ultra-high-end pro gear, so it's not fair to compare their prosumer level gear to high-end pro gear. Particularly since, as everyone here complains, the models are refreshed so frequently for so little change. Since it's not fair to compare new gear directly to a used lens I'll throw in a more expensive figure for a used lens, with a warranty.

I know Canon the best, so let's take them as an example. You budget for a 24-70 II, a brand new lens that just came out and offers extremely marginal utility over the 24-70. If we drop that to a used copy of the original, you knock $1200-1400 off the price (KEH EX+ and BGN condition with 6mo warranty, $1100 and $900 respectively). You do the exact same thing with the 70-200 f/2.8 IS II. If you go with a 70-200 f/2.8 IS in EX condition, you knock $1050 off that price ($1450). If you go with BGN, you're down to $1230, knocking a total of $1250 off your price.

So with the conservative figures, that's $2250 you can knock off the Canon setup with no real loss in quality. That puts you at $5920, which is less than your Pentax setup. Yes, if you let your eyes get the better of you and decide to buy the very best anything money can buy, your ceiling is certainly higher in a pro system.

I was comparing entry level FF camera bodies vs top of the line Pentax APS-C, I thought that was a fair comparison.

For lenses I also did not compare the street price of used lenses or BF prices which would have knocked off about 1000-1500 from that system as well. I was also debating whether it was fair to say that a pentax shooter needs an FA 31 to fill the utility provided by 50 mm f/1.4 on another system, but I don't think anything else offered there would give enough speed boost over a zoom lens.

It was more of an exercise to say if I switched system where would a logical ending place be after covering everything I might conceivably want. I just shared it here because it seemed relevant to the thread. Like I said, it might be that big price hikes are in the pipeline for Canon and Nikon users if Ricoh was just the first to bite the bullet and take the heat we are giving them for bald faced price increases.

[twitch]

I was comparing entry level FF camera bodies vs top of the line Pentax APS-C, I thought that was a fair comparison.

I did too, thanks for your efforts in putting it together

[RGlasel]

Price drives markets, yields drive prices.

There are too many references to economics in this thread for me to stay out of this argument. Cameras aren't commodities like wheat and pork bellies. Price has no impact on demand until it either exceeds a level that consumers who were planning to buy can't afford it, or it drops to a level that a new category of customer can afford it and the overall market grows. In between those boundaries, demand has nothing to do with price. On the production side, economies of scale aren't significant when the market for a particular component is in the millions of units. A production facility that produces 2 million camera sensors a year might have higher per unit production costs than a more efficient facility that can only produce 1 million units per year. And Manufacturer A isn't going to tell Manufacturer B what its production costs are.

To radically alter the cost of producing camera sensors requires a large capital investment, for R&D and retooling, that can only be recovered with sales in the millions of units. Sensor manufacturers have little incentive to give individual camera manufacturers exclusivity, because it makes it more difficult to get a good return on that investment. Unless the cost of obtaining higher pixel density is greater than the savings from producing individual sensors from a smaller quantity of inputs, smaller sensors will continue to be cheaper to produce. Entry level DSLRs aren't FF, so obviously it doesn't cost that much to get higher pixel density. Barring a huge market shift to FF cameras from other ILS cameras, no sensor manufacturer is going to make the necessary investment to eliminate the cost disadvantage of FF sensors, so lower prices for FF cameras relative to smaller sensor formats isn't going to happen.

Currently, everything points to APS-C DSLRs outselling FF DSLRs by several times. So either most DSLR buyers prefer APS-C for some non-monetary reason(s) or FF is out of their price range. And that isn't going to change.

I would bet my house that every manufacturer has loads of market research saying otherwise.

Please don't do that, it's a bet you will lose every time. Companies that already have the capability to build FF cameras can continue to produce them as long as they don't have to make large investments to sustain the product line, but to argue that FF will "win" out over smaller formats, that is a gap in logic I can't jump over.

One last thing about economics and the consumer digital camera market. Sub-components represent most of the cost of production, each camera manufacturer doesn't have to produce its own sub-components and you can manufacture a plethora of camera models from similar sub-components and similar technology. You don't have to be #1 (or even #2) to manufacture cameras profitably. In the really big picture, the 1/2.3" sensor, which is 50 times smaller than FF sensors, has completely dominated the camera market. Yes, those cameras are free when you buy a smartphone, but they also produce acceptable images for most consumers. So when we argue the merits of other types of cameras, we are looking at much smaller markets, where Moore's Law, commodity based pricing models, or king of the jungle strategies don't apply. Find something else to convince yourself that you should spend your money on FF cameras, because economics have nothing to do with it.

[RGlasel]

Ricoh is using the economic advantages of APS-C to line the pockets of the distribution channel and line their pockets

Your chart could be used to make the argument that Ricoh is selling prime lenses that only fit APS-C cameras for just as much as other manufacturers sell their FF compatible prime lenses for, but that's not exactly evidence that Ricoh is making higher profit margins for itself or its distributors.

Canon and Nikon are locked in a competitive standoff that prevents them from hiking prices

You could be right, but there are so many points of sale for those two manufacturers that it is far more likely that retailers and distributors are taking smaller margins to maintain market share. I'm not an expert on Canon and Nikon glass, but I also don't think you have included their most expensive lenses, whereas you have included DA*, Limited and an FA lens for Pentax, which are premium products priced accordingly. Pentax has a shorter lens lineup, which is a fact of life, but it does skew the comparison.

With camera phones you see new ones being launched weekly

Much larger and very different market from DSLRs; new features are basically the only way to snag new smartphone customers. I can use 30 year old lenses with my camera, but cell phones are obsolete in less than 3 years.

[Class A]

The K-5 was dynamic range king for a year and a half, and even now, after being dethroned by the D800, the difference in dynamic range is negligible. So in recent years there's been no real FF advantage for dynamic range.

Here are my thoughts on this:

You need to distinguish between the dynamic range of a scene and the dynamic range a sensor can capture.

Increasing sensor size means that the capability to capture the dynamic range of scene rises proportionally to the size increase.

With respect to the dynamic range of the sensor, the maximum number of electrons that can be registered rises by the same amount, but so does the lowest noise floor. So the dynamic range of the sensor itself stays the same, but notwithstanding, it ability to capture a higher dynamic range of a scene remains.

My understanding is that 14 EV of capture range are plenty as they will have to be mapped to a much smaller range for output media such as screens or print anyhow. The reason why we still would appreciate higher dynamic capture range is because the dynamic range of scenes can easily be higher than 14 EV. Hence, the capability of a larger sensor to capture a higher dynamic range of a scene is very welcome, even though that capability is not directly reflected in a DxOMark score.

I'd say noise will stop APS-c from going to 36 Mp before the diffraction limit will.

Image noise does not increase with the number of MP.

Please stop purporting this incorrect view.

BTW, I repeatedly invited you to share images that demonstrate your claim that the K-3 is noisier than the K-5 but you have not responded to them. Why not?

If memory serves me well, the diffraction limit for APS-c is somewhere around 40 MP.

Please define what you mean by "diffraction limit" with respect to a format size.

Do you mean the number of MP for which the format resolves the detail of a diffraction limited f/1.0 lens?
In that case, the number is much, much higher than 40MP.

[Class A]

So either most DSLR buyers prefer APS-C for some non-monetary reason(s) or FF is out of their price range. And that isn't going to change.

Is it not the case that FF has already moved into the price range of considerably more customers?

Is it not the case that the Canon 6D and the Nikon D600/610 (and even the Nikon D800 considering its performance) have been sold at significantly lower prices than previous FF cameras and that these models have been great successes in the marketplace?

What makes you think that this trend will not continue?

At some point it is going to be very hard for a manufacturer to differentiate their APS-C camera from that of another manufacturer in a way that is meaningful to the customer. An obvious way to make a camera more attractive is to increase the sensor size so I personally expect this card to be played more often in the future, now that the hitherto holy "high margin" barrier for FF cameras has started to erode.

[jsherman999]

I would slightly paraphrase Norm's comment and say that photos taken in bad conditions rarely end up particularly noteworthy, so why bother trying to make them better?.

You don't have kids, I take it.

Nothing I've shot in the past six years has been more noteworthy to me and my extended family. My kids are the reason I bought a DSLR in the first place, and those little buggers refuse to stay in perfect light and sit still.

This 'if the shooting conditions are less than ideal, don't bother shooting' argument is among the strangest I've ever seen on the fora, by the way. I can't see how it could really apply to anything but landscapes if the light was just uninteresting, or pitch-dark venues where there was almost zero light.

Anyone shooting DSLR (even aps-c! ) should be able to pull something out of the twilight:




(DA 35ltd + K20D)

.

[mikemike]

Your chart could be used to make the argument that Ricoh is selling prime lenses that only fit APS-C cameras for just as much as other manufacturers sell their FF compatible prime lenses for, but that's not exactly evidence that Ricoh is making higher profit margins for itself or its distributors.You could be right, but there are so many points of sale for those two manufacturers that it is far more likely that retailers and distributors are taking smaller margins to maintain market share. I'm not an expert on Canon and Nikon glass, but I also don't think you have included their most expensive lenses, whereas you have included DA*, Limited and an FA lens for Pentax, which are premium products priced accordingly. Pentax has a shorter lens lineup, which is a fact of life, but it does skew the comparison.Much larger and very different market from DSLRs; new features are basically the only way to snag new smartphone customers. I can use 30 year old lenses with my camera, but cell phones are obsolete in less than 3 years.

What really struck me is that Fuji is doing what Pentax could be doing if they focused on making apsc primes. In my list of primes, except for the da 15, all of them are ff compatible in spec or in fact as determined by people who have tested them with film cameras. Could they sell a 35 mm f 1.4 that is half the price and weight as the 31 ltd? Fuji does. A f 1.2 portrait lens that isn't much heavier or more expensive than the da*55? Fuji does.

Pentax doesn't have a good better best line up, especially in the primes but there choices usually land somewhere between canon and Nikon better and best choices. I would just like to see them commit to apsc and bring a greater value proposition to the table by either offering better (either faster or cheaper) apsc only lenses.

Moored law doesn't really apply to image sensors. It is about getting the same amount of transistors into a smaller space so that you can fit 4 mb of ram into the same piece of silicon that you used to have 1 mb of ram. It lets you put more mega pixels on the same size sensor from one generation to the next. But the sensor is still going to be the same size. Where it does help with the big sensors is that they can produce those sensors in older fabs because they are less concerned about the latest litho process. But yes, apsc will always be cheaper than ff sensors simply because they are smaller.