New Canon full frame?

Logsi said:
Surely that crop above is due to the differing megapixels of each sensor?
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It's due to the size of the sensor. The crop sensors have a 22 x 15mm size sensor, the full frame has 36 x 24mm. It's a huge difference. The full frame sensors gather more light and have greater resolution. Furthermore the diagonal on a Canon crop sensor is about 26.6mm (all the Canon DSLR's below the 5D range). The diagonal on the full frame sensor is 43.3mm. Comparing the two (dividing 43.3 by 26.6 gives a magnification of around 1.6.) Lenses are designed for full frame sensors, so if you have a smaller sensor size than this it effectively magnifies the lens by a factor of 1.6, that's useful if you are wanting to zoom in to something far away but it distorts wideangle lenses and portrait lenses significantly as well as the lower resolution. A Canon EF 14mm lens is 14mm with a 5D series and over 22mm on a 7D, 60D, 550D, 600D and 650D. All these have crop sensors. An 85mm portrait lens is perfect on a full frame but unsuitable at 136mm on a crop sensor. In addition you will get far better resolution on the full frame. This is why people are getting excited at the thought of a reasonably priced full frame from Canon and Nikon. A 5D Mark III costs around 3 grand with a decent lens.
 
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It's not due to the age of the sensor, it's not due to the size of the sensor, it IS due to the optical high-pass or anti aliasing filter that sit's in front of the sensor. (that's not to say crop sensors are not more demanding on lens resolution)

If your a gamer, think of it as MLAA rather than traditional AA. It blurs detail and contrast to prevent moire.

Moire however wouldn't be an issue for sensors like the 7D, D800 etc. if they had no AA filter. Lower resolution camera's with AA filters suffer more from moire.

Not all camera's use the same strength AA filter, even the 550D and 7D have different strength filter in front of the sensor.

The filter on the 5D mk1 was fairly weak, similarly with the 5D mk3. Also the D800 has a very weak AA filter due to the moire resistant high resolution sensor.

My D700 however doesn't have that weak of an AA filter, for instance the 5Dmk1 is slightly sharper.

The difference the AA filter makes can be seen below.
http://www.maxmax.com/nikon_d700hr.htm
 
When I left secondary, it was a toss up between Art school or something more sensible/practical. I ended up becoming a structural engineer. That was a mistake, I should have pursued art. Photography however, can be a nice fusion of the two mindset's.
 
A lot of us this forum have technical or scientific backgrounds, I certainly do, which is hy some of us are very interested in technical details which the more artsy photographers shun away from.

On a practical level it held to understand the science behind sensor design, auto focus, lens design trade offs, etc. In the end te process of taking a digital phot involves a huge amount of complex physics and electronics. The subtleties of which helps one understand why things like ETTR make sense, when exposure meters fail, why diffraction occurs, lens elements that lead to LOCA or focus shifting.



I'm just a geek at heart with a camera.
 
Trust me the size of the sensor is paramount. There's a huge difference in quality between a crop sensor and a full frame.

http://www.robgalbraith.com/public_files/Canon_Full-Frame_CMOS_White_Paper.pdf


An Exception said:
It's not due to the age of the sensor, it's not due to the size of the sensor, it IS due to the optical high-pass or anti aliasing filter that sit's in front of the sensor. (that's not to say crop sensors are not more demanding on lens resolution)

If your a gamer, think of it as MLAA rather than traditional AA. It blurs detail and contrast to prevent moire.

Moire however wouldn't be an issue for sensors like the 7D, D800 etc. if they had no AA filter. Lower resolution camera's with AA filters suffer more from moire.

Not all camera's use the same strength AA filter, even the 550D and 7D have different strength filter in front of the sensor.

The filter on the 5D mk1 was fairly weak, similarly with the 5D mk3. Also the D800 has a very weak AA filter due to the moire resistant high resolution sensor.

My D700 however doesn't have that weak of an AA filter, for instance the 5Dmk1 is slightly sharper.

The difference the AA filter makes can be seen below.
http://www.maxmax.com/nikon_d700hr.htm
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The size of the sensor is not the issue affecting the 7D's lack of sharpness compared to other crop sensor camera's. Neither is it a matter of the sensors technological standard itself.

Sensor size is a side issue, I hinted to that when I said "(that's not to say crop sensors are not more demanding on lens resolution)" in the couple of previous posts. Trust me, I had this argument more than once and now know the differences between different sensor format's like the back of my hand.
 
An Exception said:
When I left secondary, it was a toss up between Art school or something more sensible/practical. I ended up becoming a structural engineer. That was a mistake, I should have pursued art. Photography however, can be a nice fusion of the two mindset's.
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D.P. said:
A lot of us this forum have technical or scientific backgrounds, I certainly do, which is hy some of us are very interested in technical details which the more artsy photographers shun away from.

On a practical level it held to understand the science behind sensor design, auto focus, lens design trade offs, etc. In the end te process of taking a digital phot involves a huge amount of complex physics and electronics. The subtleties of which helps one understand why things like ETTR make sense, when exposure meters fail, why diffraction occurs, lens elements that lead to LOCA or focus shifting.



I'm just a geek at heart with a camera.
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No, my point is does anyone here know more than the engineers who designed these sensors? Were we there?

I don't shy away from these technical detail, I just choose to not read into them that much.

At the end of the day, none of these cameras are bad, just because a new camera come out 3 years later that is better, it doesn't make the old one bad. It just make the new one better, as it should be.
 
Raymond Lin said:
No, my point is does anyone here know more than the engineers who designed these sensors? Were we there?
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We don't need to be there, we don't need to know more than the engineers in sensor design in order to observe the difference of Weak AA filter Vs Strong AA filter.
Technically there is no absolute measure that is perfect, as the AA filter used to be (and mostly still is) a necessary evil.

The recent addition of video meant a stronger AA filter was needed. There are different ways to achieve the same thing however, like how the 5Diii now uses better software based processing to avoid moire in video. The downside is that it takes more processing power and power consumtion to achieve the same results in video than using an optical filter. The benefit is sharper still image results.

Raymond Lin said:
At the end of the day, none of these cameras are bad, just because a new camera come out 3 years later that is better, it doesn't make the old one bad. It just make the new one better, as it should be.
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I agree with the spirit of the point your making, but at the risk of being pedantic in order to be logically correct, if something is good or bad depends on what your comparing it to. Therefore as technology moves forward, old tech will begin to become 'bad' or 'not good' in comparison.
A better way of saying it would be "Just because a newer camera is released, doesn't make the old camera perform worse".

I have never however, considered the 7D to have great IQ, even when it was first released.
 
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The 7D has an excellent burst rate and good build quality and that's more or less it. Neither feature interests me. I have no interest in sports or wildlife photography and only keep cameras for 2 years tops. The photo outlining the NEX 7 image quality shows that a modern crop sensor will beat the ageing Canon crop sensor which gives the same results in about 6 cameras they've crammed it into. I'd be interested to see how the NEX 7 sensor compares to the D800 or 5D Mark III. I suggest it would be much poorer and that's not even bringing up the issue of lens crop and the inherent problems that causes as well as the dire lenses Sony has for the NEX system. I'm digressing though.

Getting back to the topic I hope the proposed new full frame Canon people are speculating about does materialise. I for one will always choose a full frame over a crop sensor, if I can afford it! In an ideal world I'd take either version of the D800 though, which just goes to prove some full frame sensors are better than others, but that's a different subject :)

An Exception said:
The size of the sensor is not the issue affecting the 7D's lack of sharpness compared to other crop sensor camera's. Neither is it a matter of the sensors technological standard itself.

Sensor size is a side issue, I hinted to that when I said "(that's not to say crop sensors are not more demanding on lens resolution)" in the couple of previous posts. Trust me, I had this argument more than once and now know the differences between different sensor format's like the back of my hand.
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Vertigo1 said:
Very interesting: http://www.canonrumors.com/2012/07/canons-next-full-frame-camera-cr2/

Have to say I'd buy that in a snap! I'll never get rid of my 7D as I don't want to lose the crop factor but I'd like to add a full frame body at some point. I couldn't justify the 5D3 so was looking to get a used 5DmkII at some point but, if Canon release something like that at around £1500, has to be a no-brainer surely?
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It's a definite no brainer. For portraits and landscapes the new Canon Full Frame sounds ideal and is a reasonable price. The question is what sensor will Canon use and what features from the Mark III will they cut. They need a good camera release in the wake of the outstanding performance of the Nikon D800.
 
CameraObscura said:
The 7D has an excellent burst rate and good build quality and that's more or less it. Neither feature interests me. I have no interest in sports or wildlife photography and only keep cameras for 2 years tops. The photo outlining the NEX 7 image quality simply shows that a modern crop sensor will beat the ageing Canon crop sensor.
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I think you are miss-understanding what I'm saying. If you was to remove the 7D's AA filter, the sharpness and contrast would be very very similar to the Nex7.

That was why I posted the below link to show the difference between having an AA filter, and not having an AA filter on the same sensor. The people at maxmax actually offer an AA filter removal service.
 
CameraObscura said:
It's a definite no brainer. For portraits and landscapes the new Canon Full Frame sounds ideal and is a reasonable price. The question is what sensor will Canon use and what features from the Mark III will they cut. They need a good camera release in the wake of the outstanding performance of the Nikon D800.
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I won't be jumping on the D800 bandwagon until the AF issues are resolved. I not a fan of Thom Hogan, but I agree with his current 'not recommended' recommendation.
 
An Exception said:
I think you are miss-understanding what I'm saying. If you was to remove the 7D's AA filter, the sharpness and contrast would be very very similar to the Nex7.

That was why I posted the below link to show the difference between having an AA filter, and not having an AA filter on the same sensor. The people at maxmax actually offer an AA filter removal service.
Click to expand...

Sure I know I'm coming from a different angle no harm intended. It was a good post and it was very interesting to see the NEX image v the Canon. I'm just desperate to buy a camera and ideally a reasonably priced full frame from canon so apologies for going on about it! If I was you I'd stick with the D700 a top quality full frame. If I had one of those I'd keep it for at least 5 years. Another point is that I'm still thinking of the 5D Mark II as I've a suspicion it may give similar or possibly better results than the new Canon full frame.
 
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I'd wait or get the mk1 for now. I think the new entry full frame will be better than the mk2, especially the AF.

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Or maybe pickup a used 5dii if you can find a good deal
 
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An Exception said:
I'd wait or get the mk1 for now. I think the new entry full frame will be better than the mk2, especially the AF.

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Or maybe pickup a used 5dii if you can find a good deal
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Fair points. I'd rather not touch a used camera as knowing my luck I'd land a lemon on evilbay. The image quality I've seen from the Mark II is still remarkable it's only the recent releases of the Mark III and D800 that have led to people disregarding it. It is probably worth waiting on the new full frame to see if it's got the Mark III sensor inside. If it's got something really awkward like a poor viewfinder I may well try and source a brand new Mark II if there are still any out there. A few suppliers are still selling them new. I tend to manual focus anyway :)
 
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