Site Supporter Join Date: Nov 2008 Location: Tasmania, Australia |
I think the OP makes some very cogent points in his initial post on this subject. However, the contention that the Q is photographically irrelevant is, I think, quite wide of the mark, but there's been enough discussion about the Q in other threads to allow me to say that many Q users here don't share that viewpoint, me included, and leave it at that.
The other issue is that of the APS-C sensor format, and its continued relevance. It's worth reflecting for a moment on what are the driving factors for its continued existence. Obviously, sensor cost as a percentage of the total body build is a major issue, and an APS-C sensor will always cost less than a 35mm format one, regardless of the relative sales of each format, unless APS-C bodies were to become a very small niche market, requiring occasional special manufacturing runs to produce enough sensors to warrant the effort. The momentum in sales of APS-C will probably ensure that this doesn't happen, but the other driving factor is the continuing need to develop better sensors, which will ensure that production costs won't drop dramatically, at least in the short term, while the trade-off against price lowering continues to be technological improvement.
The other major driver is the size and cost of lenses, both of which are lower for the APS-C format than for larger ones. Now, some will argue that, for true equivalence of APS-C and 35mm sensors, the maximum aperture of the APS-C lenses must a stop greater than for equivalent 35mm format lenses. Of course, that's true as far as minimising Depth of Field goes, but irrelevant otherwise. I suspect bokeh is a bigger issue for most photographers than minimal DoF, and that's largely a matter of lens choice.
The noise advantage of 35mm sensors also continues to be diminished with each new development of the technology, although, for the type of sensor with the same pixel density, it will always be better than that of a smaller sensor.
Of course, many of the same things can be said of the 4/3rds sensor, in relation to APS-C, albeit to a slightly greater extent, as it is 61% of the area of an APS-C sensor, whereas an APS-C sensor is 57% of the area of a 35mm sensor, though I doubt the difference is significant.
The final point to consider is that a DSLR's optical viewfinder brightness will diminish, proportional to sensor area, for a given eyepiece magnification, which is possibly a good part of the reason why most 4/3rds cameras aren't DSLRs, though Olympus certainly tried to make it work in that format.
Of all the issues considered here, the only one that is not subject to technological improvement concerns the OVF, and that will at some point be rendered irrelevant when EVFs become effectively as good as OVFs. When that will be is anyone's guess, but Sony is clearly suggesting at will be sometime not too distant. When that happens, there will be equal pressure on both 35mm and APS-C formats from 4/3rds, at least in the enthusiast parts of the market, but probably eventually also in much of the professional market. How the buying public reacts to that will be interesting, but I doubt anyone's got a halfway good prediction of what it will turn out to be. The way the future market shapes up may well be determined on size, as well as price, and that might mean the APS-C camera survives simply because it feels right in some hands, and the cost premium over smaller formats is not too great.
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