How much better is Full-Frame really?

[gsgary]

I love FF for the narrow DOF i can get, last year i was shooting a dog agility event indoors with my 1Dmk2 and 300F2.8L at ISO3200 and it was struggling a bit but when we printed them at 8x6 on a dye sub they looked good, halfway through the event i tried my 5Dmk1 and it worked a treat

sold more 5D shots than 1Dmk2

 

[Neil S.]

You'll be like a handsome tall white guy walking down Tokyo if you had a full frame Neil.

I would love to go back to Tokyo again for sightseeing. Its a great place to take pictures.

Its hard to find the time/money now though.

 

[Rekd]

That's some ****ed up **** right there! I thanked a guy twice in the same thread on the same day. And he's a Nikon guy!

Excellent way to explain that. Thank you!

and MANY sports shooters also like the Canon 7D because of the high MP count and crop-sensor...but people who shoot at really DARK venues where absolute,pure ISO value at f/2.8 or f/2 or f/1.4 is "the key" to getting action stopping, clear, low-noise images are kind of gravitating toward the Nikon D3s, which has about a 1.5 stop advantage in absolute noise over the Canon 1D-IV at 16.1 MP on a 1.3x sized sensor

I shoot a lot of dark venues (and hope to do more now that I've had a taste of concerts at a "professional" level) and bought the 7D because a) id has better high ISO than the 50D I had and b) because I really wanted video and the 50D didn't have it.

I'm going with Canon simply because I have some old Canon lenses already and they work ok for now. (I'll replace them slowly with good glass, got my first L 3 weeks ago). But it sounds like I should have saved a bit more and gone with a FF instead of the crop.

Methinks I may have to take a ride over to Calumet and rent a FF body for my next indoor/night event.

 

[Neil S.]

I love FF for the narrow DOF i can get, last year i was shooting a dog agility event indoors with my 1Dmk2 and 300F2.8L at ISO3200 and it was struggling a bit but when we printed them at 8x6 on a dye sub they looked good, halfway through the event i tried my 5Dmk1 and it worked a treat

sold more 5D shots than 1Dmk2

I wonder how my 85mm 1.2 would look on a 5D mk II?

What do they go for used in good condition? Like $2000 or something?

 

[MrLogic]

Same with Nikon's D3x at 24.6 MP on FF...that sensor demands the absolute best Nikkor lenses, and diffraction creeps in very fast...smaller f/stops look like crap. Thom Hogan has shown that a 12.2 MP D3 file shot with a good lens can be up-sampled to D3x pixel count, and look virtually identical to most people. Hogan has found that it takes the newest, most-modern,highest-resolution NIkon lenses like the 200 f/2 VR and the 24mm PC-E to show what the D3x sensor is actually *capable of resolving*.

Very interesting, but I can't find it on Thom's site. Could you post a link?

I wonder what lenses he used, besides the 200 VR and 24 PC-E...

 

[Big Mike]

There are some advantages to using crop cameras though.

"Reach" is the main one that people will say. While you don't actually get any more magnification with a smaller sensor, can can more easily fill the frame with a distant subject, than with a full frame.

Another one is DOF (more DOF). An example of when this would be useful, might be shooting a bride & groom giving their speech in a dark reception hall. The light is low, so you want to shoot at F2.8 to get the best shutter speed. A full frame camera, however, might not have enough DOF at F2.8, to get both the bride & groom in focus at the same time. A crop sensor camera, on the other hand, just might have enough DOF at F2.8.
With the full frame, you might have to stop down to F4, in order to get enough DOF, but you'd be sacrificing shutter speed.

Of course, this argument sort of falls apart when you consider ISO. A full frame camera is likely to be better at higher ISO, so you can gain back the lost shutter speed by turning up the ISO a full stop.

 

[Neil S.]

There are some advantages to using crop cameras though.

"Reach" is the main one that people will say. While you don't actually get any more magnification with a smaller sensor, can can more easily fill the frame with a distant subject, than with a full frame.

Another one is DOF (more DOF). An example of when this would be useful, might be shooting a bride & groom giving their speech in a dark reception hall. The light is low, so you want to shoot at F2.8 to get the best shutter speed. A full frame camera, however, might not have enough DOF at F2.8, to get both the bride & groom in focus at the same time. A crop sensor camera, on the other hand, just might have enough DOF at F2.8.
With the full frame, you might have to stop down to F4, in order to get enough DOF, but you'd be sacrificing shutter speed.

Of course, this argument sort of falls apart when you consider ISO. A full frame camera is likely to be better at higher ISO, so you can gain back the lost shutter speed by turning up the ISO a full stop.

Informative post.

It seems to me that if and when I do buy a full-frame body, my 7D will be far from useless status.

It will be good to have for these very reasons, and also will prevent lens changes as often.

I think the 5D mk II uses the same new Canon battery that the 7D uses as well. :thumbup:

 

[inov8ter]

This might be a dumb question, but is there anybody that has both types that can take the same type of shot with both just to show the difference using the same lens and everything. It would be cool to see the difference between them and get like a low light and maybe something else.

 

[gsgary]

I love FF for the narrow DOF i can get, last year i was shooting a dog agility event indoors with my 1Dmk2 and 300F2.8L at ISO3200 and it was struggling a bit but when we printed them at 8x6 on a dye sub they looked good, halfway through the event i tried my 5Dmk1 and it worked a treat

sold more 5D shots than 1Dmk2

I wonder how my 85mm 1.2 would look on a 5D mk II?

What do they go for used in good condition? Like $2000 or something?

The 85 looks good on a 5Dmk2

 

[Neil S.]

I love FF for the narrow DOF i can get, last year i was shooting a dog agility event indoors with my 1Dmk2 and 300F2.8L at ISO3200 and it was struggling a bit but when we printed them at 8x6 on a dye sub they looked good, halfway through the event i tried my 5Dmk1 and it worked a treat

sold more 5D shots than 1Dmk2

I wonder how my 85mm 1.2 would look on a 5D mk II?

What do they go for used in good condition? Like $2000 or something?

The 85 looks good on a 5Dmk2

OO do you have both?

If so your my hero lol! :thumbup:

 

[cfusionpm]

If the T2i or 7D sensor's small pixel size and high pixel density were to be carried over to a 24x36mm sized FF sensor, I think it'd be a 39.5 megapixel sensor, if my memory serves me right. At that pixel density, today's Canon lenses would not, for the most part, be good enough to actually utilize that high of an MP count, and diffraction would begin to limit picture sharpness at probably around f/2.5....meaning almost no lens in current production would be at its absolute best performance, and the images shot at smaller apertures like f/4.5 even would look crummy...It's almost like a street legal car that can go 195 miles per hour...a driver, and a road, that could handle that kind of capability would be far, and few between.

That's not based on science or anything is it? According to their calculations, you have up until around f/8 or f/11 before diffraction limitation becomes an issue. When was the last time you held a 7D and tried this out for yourself?

I know you always have a mountain of "I hate high MP sensor" essays that you love sharing here, but how much of it is based on actual work with them and how much is theoretical or what you read about on the internet?

 

[Neil S.]

If the T2i or 7D sensor's small pixel size and high pixel density were to be carried over to a 24x36mm sized FF sensor, I think it'd be a 39.5 megapixel sensor, if my memory serves me right. At that pixel density, today's Canon lenses would not, for the most part, be good enough to actually utilize that high of an MP count, and diffraction would begin to limit picture sharpness at probably around f/2.5....meaning almost no lens in current production would be at its absolute best performance, and the images shot at smaller apertures like f/4.5 even would look crummy...It's almost like a street legal car that can go 195 miles per hour...a driver, and a road, that could handle that kind of capability would be far, and few between.

That's not based on science or anything is it? When was the last time you held a 7D and tried this out?

I know you always have a mountain of "I hate high MP sensor" essays that you love sharing here, but how much of it is based on actual work with them and how much is theoretical or what you read about on the internet?

Derrel...

I feel that my 7D performs very well even stopped down.

I of course have no point of reference vs. a full-frame body though, since I don't own both.

 

[cfusionpm]

Methinks I may have to take a ride over to Calumet and rent a FF body for my next indoor/night event.

Not necessarily. Derrel has a reputation for greatly hating everything about high megapixel cameras, and will skew or distort minor differences into seemingly huge issues.

Here are a couple shots I took at a concert with my 7D and 70-200; shot wide open at f/2.8 and ISO 3200: image 1, image 2, image 3. Each has a bit of noise reduction from Lightroom 3 and other basic adjustments, but that's it. It can handle 6400 decently for "mostly usable" images as well (will look about as good/bad as 3200 out of a 50D). So if you consider this "horrible" low light performance, then by all means, rent a FF. From my brief personal experience with the 5DmkII though, the autofocus struggles significantly in low light. Combine that with the depth of field issue brought up earlier and the big advancements in the 7D, there's a lot more to low light performance than just ISO.

 

[djacobox372]

Another perk of full frame is the shallow DOF. Given the same distance and focal length, you get less DOF with a larger sensor. This can also be seen in all the P&S digi-cams with tiny sensors, their DOF is usually very deep.

Cool thanks Mike. :thumbup:

I did not know this.

I really want one, but it is going to have to wait for the time being.

Does anyone know when the 5D mk III is coming out by any chance?

Not many consider the dof difference... I didn't think about it when I bought my d700, and I was amazed at how narrow the dof was when shooting fast lenses.

Shooting a 50mm at f1.4 on a full-frame camera is like shooting a 35mm at f0.85 on a crop sensor camera.

 

[kundalini]

This might be a dumb question, but is there anybody that has both types that can take the same type of shot with both just to show the difference using the same lens and everything. It would be cool to see the difference between them and get like a low light and maybe something else.

Not dumb at all and in fact quite a sensible quesion.

To give you two side-by-side examples, using Nikon. The setup was the same for each as far as apeture, ISO, camera to subject distance, lighting. Most people will either have a 50mm prime or the capability to hit a 50mm focal length.

Focal Length: 50mm
Apeture: f/7.1.
ISO: 200
Camera to subject distance: ~48"
Lighting: One SB-800 in 24" soft box ~60" away at 45° on lens axis. One SB-800 with 8" snoot ~ 60" away at 135° feathered hair light, diffuser below subject to catch spill light and redirect on subject. Flashes triggered by CyberSyncs.


..........................D300 (1.5 crop) 1/13s......................................................................................D700 (FF) 1/8s...............

With the available light diminishing, I knew I was losing ~ one stop of light between changing out cameras, lenses, reattaching the transmitter, refocusing, blah, blah, blah. So I bracketed the set of shots with the D700 (second shot). It turned out I was ~2/3 stop for an equivalent ambient light. Thus the difference between 1/13s on the D300 and 1/8s on the D700. Close enough, I say.