Originally posted by BigMackCam I disagree. The research going into sensors benefits all formats, from tiny phone sensors to large full frame and medium format cameras. As such, my assumption is that however advanced small sensors become, larger sensors with larger photo sites will always remain ahead of them, assuming they leverage the same advances in technology...
The theory that a rising tide floats all boats is a good one, but in this instance, diminishing returns will hit large sensors pretty hard. The rising tide will raise the small boats far more than it will the large ones in this instance.
All that has to happen is for cell phone cameras to get good enough for people to stop seeing enough benefit of carrying a large camera (as well as their cell phone) to stop carrying the large camera in favour of what they already carry all the time.
We have seen this time and again in the camera world, and equally often in other areas.
No one would try to argue (at least I hope they wouldn’t) that 35mm film gave a better image than medium format, yet 35mm became the most popular format and pushed medium format to the fringes of photography, to be used by an increasingly small number of pros and enthusiasts.
This was after medium format had done the same thing to large format.
In my travels in the 1980s and 90s, I spent a lot of time in the American southwest, a region that is a landscape photographer’s nirvana. In something like a dozen trips to Utah and New Mexico, I only once saw a large format camera other than my own. For that matter, I almost never saw a medium format camera either.
Fast forward to the late 1990s, and along came the digital revolution. Actually, it was more like a tidal wave. People took up digital cameras in droves. It didn’t matter to them that the quality of the early digital couldn’t even hold up to a throw away single use camera, the convenience of not having to drop a film off at the lab was more important than quality.
Even pros, a normally pretty conservative lot adopted digital early on, even though they were trading quality for other criteria.
In other areas of technology we saw the same thing. Reel to reel tape decks gave better sound than cassettes, but guess what won the market? CDs are poorer quality than vinyl, but they killed the record industry anyway. MP3s that can be downloaded from the internet aren’t as good as CDs, but CD sales aren’t what they used to be.
Of course most people can’t hear the difference anyway. By the time we hit our late 30s, we’ve lost enough range of hearing that we are kidding ourselves if we think we can tell the difference between a well pressed LP and an MP3.
It’s not about quality, it’s about good enough.