The Remarkable Persistence of 24x36
theonlinephotographer.typepad.com
theonlinephotographer.typepad.com
Oh, and I should add: an ethical ad based revenue model. Ads are self hosted, js free, and only for companies that the author believes his audience may be interested in.
Small amount of small static ad images on the side is perfectly OK for me, but they probably don't generate as much income as those that interrupt you.
Well static ads don’t have to be pay per click / or per view, so it’s likely they set their own placement price and make their money up front. Under that scenario they would be making money as long as the ad space is occupied.
So it’s like buying a billboard. The advertisers have to decide if it’s worth their money or not. But the operator will be making money as long as the ad space is occupied.
When I was a teenager I desperately wanted a 35 mm SLR. I bought photography magazines, read all the reviews. For me, price was the biggest factor, so I was looking at Pentax K1000-class cameras, which could be had then for a little over $100 with a lens.
The thing that struck me then, and still strikes me today, is the sheer amount of brand snobbishness in photography. Back then, you weren't a “real” photographer”, and you weren't using a “real” camera, unless you were shooting Nikon, Canon, or Leica. And of those, only the Canons were at all affordable. And yet, you could throw the exact same Ektachrome in any 35 mm camera, grab a good prime lens, and shoot exactly the same pictures. No one on earth could tell whether you had taken it with a Leica or a Pentax.
And the same thing is true today. Today, because most of my photography (which is, again, mediocre) is travel photography, I shoot an Olympus em-10 with a $300 lens most of the time. It's small and it won't break my heart if it gets broken or stolen. The m43 system has a ton of great lenses and high quality camera bodies. With the different sensors it's now possible, in theory, to even tell the difference between pictures shot on an Olympus and a FF Nikon, but in practice 99% of photographers won't ever realize those differences. But it isn't a Nikon or a Leica, so I'm still not using a “real” camera.
Anyway, my point is this: to be perfectly honest, I doubt the ability of the field to choose standards based in technical merit. There are decent reasons to desire FF cameras over APS or m43 — the availability of a lot of legacy lens designs, for instance — but as far as I can tell that isn't the real reason it's taking off. It's taking off because it's now possible to drop ten grand on such a system.
Sorry for the cynicism. But I've been told so often that I'm not using a real camera that I finally just decided to ignore the hype and enjoy taking pictures.
If you try to print big (let's say A3+) you'll rapidly find the limits of the m43 system.
I’ve printed a good number of images shot on m43 at about that size, and that’s not been my experience. The specifics definitely matter, but I’ve found Olympus’s M.Zuiko 75/1.8 to be competitive with a 70-200/2.8 in terms of sharpness, distortion, etc, for instance (dxomark seem to broadly agree: https://www.dxomark.com/Lenses/Olympus/Olympus-MZUIKO-DIGITA... vs https://www.dxomark.com/Lenses/Nikon/AF-S-VR-Zoom-Nikkor-70-...). You do have a larger minimum DoF, but 150/3.6 equivalent is not that far off.
I would like a bit more resolution, but that’s also true of my Nikon D4S (also 16MP).
Clearly FF and m43 have different strengths, and you’ll get the best results by playing to the strengths of each. I concede that all else being equal, larger sensors do afford you more flexibility (lower light performance, for instance). On the other hand, traveling with my Nikon FF kit is a huge PITA (mostly due to the lenses; the body is a constant cost I can mostly deal with).
I’d love to hear more about the limitations you’ve hit with larger prints on m43.
I do my printing at 720 ppi on Pictorico OHP transparency stock, which I then use to contact print cyanotypes or pt/pd (I'm really dedicated to useless stuff). You can see how the resolution requirements for anything bigger than a postcard are stringent.
In practice I use either a Sony A7r (36mp, with very sharp primes) a Sigma with a foveon sensor (which holds up very well to the Sony at ISO 100, and it's not like I use the Sony at more than ISO 100) or high-resolution scans from Adox CMS20 II microfilm stock (ISO 20, there is a special low contrast developer for pictorial contrast) shoot on a Leica or Contax with their respective very highly resolving primes.
> Anyway, my point is this: to be perfectly honest, I doubt the ability of the field to choose standards based in technical merit.
Well, here in the software industry we have the same problem. I wonder why that is.
Some of us have also been patiently waiting for "full frame" DSLR bodies are doing it because a fast normal lens (so-called because it has (much handwaving) roughly the same field of view as your eyes) is so cheap as to be basically free compared to a nice DSLR body. A similarly fast and sharp 28mm or 35mm (roughly a normal lens on an APS-C-sized sensor) is vastly more expensive, if it's available at all.
Pentax[0], to my (limited) knowledge never made a 35mm or 28mm lens that came close to matching the speed and sharpness of the SMC Pentax-M 50mm f/1.7, which can be had <$50 US on ebay. The first 28mm f/2 I see listed is $430, the much commoner f/2.8 and f/3.5 are much cheaper, but give up a lot in low light performance.
The 50mm f/1.7 is a mighty fine lens; the arguably better 50mm f/1.4 goes for <$100. It's not until you're looking at the rare, super fast, and arguably yet better still (I have no personal experience) 50mm f/1.2 that you hit the price range of the 28mm f/2.
So whether you're buying at the peanuts end of the price range or the high end, you're giving up a stop and a half of low light performance going with APS-C over 24x36.
It could be argued that with ever improving digital sensors, low light performance in a lens is less important now than ever. There's probably merit to that.
Still, as mentioned in TFA the faster lenses let you make different choices with regards to depth of field than you have with a slower lens. I'd rather have that choice, historical preferences of f/64 notwithstanding.
[0] I'm not going into lens generations here. As an extremely casual user, I buy what's good, used, and cheap. I'm strictly an M42 and SMC-M guy, and can't compare with anything newer; my overall impression from reading reviews is that the SMC-K, -M, and -A generations are largely comparable for the same focal length and aperture. The M42 generations are adequately comparable, at least for folks like me.
Mirrorless, with its short backfocus distance compared to SLRs, does bring onto table the feasibility of inexpensive and compact "normal" lenses for APS-C and smaller sensors. The Panasonic 25mm f/1.8 for MFT is a good example, as is the recently announced Canon EF-M 32mm f/1.4.
- AN lens is over-engineered. They didn't have CAD to help them design a lens that is perfectly "sharp enough" at a certain resolution so just made a design that had way more resolving power than it needed.
The downside is that the AN lens probably cost more new when adjusted for inflation. e.g. Voigtlander lenses for Nikon may seem expensive but adjusted for inflation they are comparable in price to Nikon's made in Japan, all-metal lenses from back in the day.
- Sample variation. Maybe your new lens is a dud; it happens
- user error. More than once I have seen a lens review call a lens soft when the test picture is obviously not focused correctly
Do modern sensors have enough more resolution than film that they show the loss of sharpness in the lens at smaller apertures? I'm curious because I'll be looking for a (used) DSLR body at some point in the next few years. At least in the Pentax world, most of the commentary about old lenses on new bodies centers around the lack of the mechanical aperture coupling on the newer bodies, and the compromises stemming from that (stop-down metering, mostly).
Film quite obviously shows soft corners too, just most people didn't care because they weren't obvious at the sizes normal people view or printed photos.
I wouldn't worry about soft corners to be honest. It's like criticizing a classic muscle car because it has a slower 0-100 than newer ones
I say this because some of my favorite lens/camera combinations are those with issues far beyond mere unsharpness, and that would likely be rejected by the mass of Internet forum cognoscenti in favor of native lenses that I know from experience that I'd never use even if I already owned them.
Case in point: an old Arri/Zeiss 16mm f/1.2 cine lens that I shoot on Micro Four Thirds, despite the fact that it was designed for the much smaller 16mm (motion picture) format: in spite of edges are soft at all apertures, corners that aren't so much "soft" as "missing altogether", an overall image almost certainly less sharp than the average native kit zoom, and various other technical considerations compromising optical performance, I enjoy both the process of shooting with the lens and the results when I do. So why, then, should I give a damn what the Internet thinks?
Whereas, I sold the more "appropriate" Panasonic 15mm f/1.7 native lens several years ago, at a considerable loss, for lack of use.
There are many recent lens designs that are tack sharp all over the frame already at maximum aperture, outresolving even a modern high-pixel-density APS-C sensor. But those have complex optical formulas and consequently are almost always large, heavy, and expensive. For instance, the extremely sharp Sigma 50mm f/1.4 A weighs 815 grams compared to the 290 grams of the venerable Canon 50mm/1.4, and the 130 grams of the plastic fantastic 50mm/1.8!
...Nikon making their flagship lenses for their mirrorless camera "slow" is a very good sign to me. It is a sign that they are concentrating on their photo-taking ability rather than specs. I think they did serious soul searching after their dud 105mm f/1.4 (it's great at f/1.4, as long as you only want one eye in focus)
Actually it is possible to mostly get rid of the kind of flare I am talking about in post. It depends on the lens but often the are actually have high resolution wide open, just the flare makes them look softer.
> A sharp lens is strictly more useful in the digital era.
Sure, if sharpness is the only criteria you judge usefulness by. Nifty 50 lenses are still tiny and cheap and sharp enough for most things.
For instance, when subjects are not neatly aligned near a narrow plane orthogonal to the lens axis, employing a bit of lens tilt may enable shooting at a considerably larger aperture without losing focus on any of the subjects.
In such cases, as a result of diffraction effects at larger apertures, a tilt/shift (or view camera) lens that fares comparatively poorly in resolution tests may nevertheless produce a sharper image of the subjects than a lens without movements could ever hope to produce, even in theory.
Yet many feel tilt/shift effects are overused and passé, and mistakenly believe they are always achievable in post…
This problem doesn't exist with a system, where all lenses are matched to the sensor size. This becomes very apparent with mFT: the 25mm, like the Olympus 25/1.8 are stunningly good for a very reasonable price.
BTW I love M42 Takumars. Auto-Takumar 55mm f/2 is one of my prized possessions :-)
It's large enough for the double-Gauss lens (a.k.a. normal prime lens) to have a nice shallow deep of field wide open. f/1.2 is close to the limit of a typical SLR mount. So a normal 50mm f/1.2 lens gets us 42mm of aperture. This means we can get the same depth of field and angle of view as a 6x7 medium format with a 110mm f/2.8 lens or a 4x5 large format with a 180mm f/4.5 (but with a much smaller system!) And we get a faster lens as a bonus.
Smaller formats lose some of that versatility of composition. The focal length of the normal lens on APS-C is 32mm. We would need f/0.8 lens to the same DOF. That's not possible on an SLR mount. Mirrorless systems with their shorter flange distances could get us there. But even then there are limits to how short the flange can be because image sensors become much less efficient as the angle of incidence of the light hitting them increases.
And why was movie film 35mm wide? It seems an odd width. William Dickson was going for a frame 1 inch wide, then added 3/8" for the sprocket holes. The original specification was in Imperial units: 1 3/8" (34.925mm). I don't know when or why its name turned to metric.
"At the end of the year 1889, I increased the width of the picture from 1/2 inch to 3/4 inch, then to 1 inch by 3/4 inch high. The actual width of the film was 1 3/8 inches to allow for the perforations now punched on both edges [...]." --- https://archive.org/stream/journalofsociety21socirich#page/4...
To go back further, we would have to ask, why is an inch an inch?
I don't quite understand this part. If 35mm film was "standard" but photographers had a strong preference for square images, why wasn't there a proliferation of cameras that could shoot 24x24mm images on the same type of film?
Re: too small; an 8x10, one of the smaller standard print formats for portraits, is about an 8x enlargement from a 35mm frame. With modern materials and good technique, 8x-11x is feasible, but starting to push it at the edges; I have printed 13x17s off 35mm but I would not want to push it much larger. 35mm does 4x6s, 5x7s and 8x10s perfectly reasonably, which is what it spent most of its time doing for common consumer work. It's worth noting that one of the other common consumer cameras of the 1940s was the Brownie, which output 6cmx9cm images and was routinely contact printed, producing something smaller even than a 4x6.
120 produces images that are between 1.8x (in the 645 format) or 2.5x (in most others) as large, physically, meaning that the common enlargements are only 4x-5x. If you push it, with quality equipment, you start getting into print sizes that are super clumsy to handle like 20x24. I've never printed, personally, anything larger than a 16x20. If you do your own wet processing they're also nicer to work with—35mm negatives are real small and kinda fiddly. 4x5 sheets are also delightful to work with, of course, but they require fighting the camera in the field.
> I can think of are twin-lens reflex cameras
> like the Rolleiflex, which are delightful
> but somewhat uncommon.
The Kodak Brownie, a cheap consumer camera that sold in the millions, was a 120 camera that shot square pictures, same format as a Hasselblad or a Rolleiflex. The original Box Brownie came out in 1900 and was the most popular camera in the world for years going through various models up to the 1960s. That's how long the 120 square format was a popular consumer format.
Many pros push 35mm to billboard sizes. The size of the print doesn't matter. It's the viewing distance.
If there was a need to maximize the capture for technical reasons I imagine it would be easier to just oversize the film or sensor and trim the corners.
There was. The 126 cartridge film was the same stock as 35mm, and square format. Since it was a cartridge and needed no sprockets, the image area 26mm x 26mm.