{"id":437,"date":"2008-10-25T23:38:53","date_gmt":"2008-10-25T13:38:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ayton.id.au\/wp02\/?p=437"},"modified":"2009-07-21T11:57:03","modified_gmt":"2009-07-21T01:57:03","slug":"small-sensors-may-yet-rule-the-day","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.ayton.id.au\/wp02\/?p=437","title":{"rendered":"Small sensors may yet rule the day!"},"content":{"rendered":"

There is a short term trend towards the full frame dSLRs as they come down in price, but an interesting comparison of prints from a Canon G10 point and shoot and a $40,000 39megapixel medium format Hasselblad seems to show little difference in prints up to 13″x19″ prints of landscape scenes!<\/p>\n

See here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Now of course, the larger sensor has more narrow depth of field and will perform much better on larger prints, and presumably better at ISO > 200, and on skin tones.<\/p>\n

You can get this quality out of a $500 camera which has a sensor a fifth the size of the Olympus \/ Panasonic Four Thirds and Micro Four Thirds.<\/p>\n

In my experience, a 10mp high quality image at ISO 100 from an Olympus E510 is not that much different (again ignoring DOF) to my almost full frame 10mp Canon 1DMIII when printed to 20″x30″.<\/p>\n

I suspect that if the Canon G10 were 10mp instead of 15mp, you would get just as good prints, and have the added benefit of less noise at higher ISO – but I guess we will never find out the answer to that one!<\/p>\n

As sensor technology improves, the better edge-to-edge optical quality that is possible with Four Thirds lenses may mean that prints up to 20″x30″ may always be as good, if not better than full frame dSLRs when used at an ISO 2 stops lower than the full frame given similar sensor technologies.<\/p>\n

Now, at present, Four Thirds sensors give best results at ISO < 400, but as technology improves, this will inevitably rise to the point that, apart from DOF considerations, there may not be many photographic situations where a full frame will outperform a Four Thirds camera.\n\nSure the full frame may be doing acceptably noiseless images at some stage in technology advances at ISO 25,000 while the Four Thirds will be at 6400, but in reality, the far majority of images will still only need ISO < 400, which will mean the advantages of the full frame may be reserved for:\n\n\n