full frame - would you? (1 Viewer)

with Sony getting agressive on Full Frames with the a850 (ok pricing in the uk is a little high but it'll soon drop) would you consider changing from aps-c to full frame if they were priced at £1000/$1500?

Given the crop factor for "enlarging" the picture of distant birds and the size of the RAW file from a 24Mb sensor I'll stick with my Sony A700.

I'm lucky enough to own both a crop and a full frame camera and enjoy using both, but there's no doubt that the full frame delivers better images. If I could afford a second full frame camera I would have one, if they drop to sub £1000 I'll be very pleased.

postcardcv said:

I'm lucky enough to own both a crop and a full frame camera and enjoy using both, but there's no doubt that the full frame delivers better images. If I could afford a second full frame camera I would have one, if they drop to sub £1000 I'll be very pleased.

Click to expand...

i can understand why that should be for landscapes and people etc but i'm intrigued why that should be for wildlife. the 24mp sensor in the d3x and the a900 offers a apsc 10.2 image in apsc mode so you are getting less pixels if you have to crop. if you can get close enough then all bets are off of course.

is the focusing better on the canon full frames? the d300 has the same af essentially as the full frames.

in nikon land, nikon really need to introduce some decent consumer FF zooms. the f2.8's are excellent. the dx lineup is really good, why they introduced an updated 18-200 is beyond me. when they need something like sony's 28-75.

Sony are really working hard on there FF range, lighter/cheaper 28-75 f2.8 good 70-300 and 70-400. if they introduce a cheaper 16/17-40 and if the a800 16-18mp ff as rumoured is true it'll start putting pressure on the others. of course for birders they need some big telephotos!

The full frame body I have is a 1Ds mkII, the focusing, handling and image quality is significantly better than the crop bodies that I've used.

Until the OEMs can put a FF sensor in a smaller body I will not be interested. Even the APS-C Nikon D300 and Canon 50D are already a little too big for my hands to grip without cramping. Pentax seems to be going the right direction size-wise with their new K-7 though and their up coming medium format dlsr is not much bigger than other FF cameras.

cheers,
Rick

While I am very happy with the results I get from my D2x-most of the images on my blog are actually crops from the already small sensor, there are times where a full frame would be nice.
Usually its macro subjects that would benefit, but sometimes it is birds-yesterdays Dunlin at Farmoor was getting too close at times and a bigger sensor would have helped. This particular image is the entire frame resized.

For macro I certainly would go for it. For wildlife - well, that depends on other things as well such as frame rate and buffer. I am quite happy with my 40D in that respect. But if it physically was anything smaller than the xxD series' body, I wouldn't get it. I had to add a vertical grip on my 350D to make it useful, especially for macro.

Thomas