There seem to be a huge contingent of people who have absolutely no trouble with the DX-sized sensor.

Their basic arguments:

1. Non-DX lenses get the sweet-spot of the lens when on a DX-sized sensor.
2. They love having a reduced field of view (crop-factor).
   1. They mistakenly think they crop-factor is a “zoom-factor”- that their 50mm is now all of the sudden an 75mm lens.
3. They think it’d cost too much to go FF or offer technical arguments (yield rates on the chips, telecentrism, F-mount size, etc)
4. They like smaller, lighter, slower (mainly) variable-aperture lenses.
5. They don’t know any difference because they don’t have any non-DX lenses and they love Nikon so much that they can’t stand to see any criticism of the company because that would be criticizing themselves.

Did I miss any?
Responding to their aguments:

1. Ok fine.
2. These guys drive me up the wall! Maybe it’s just me, but I wouldn’t likely have bought a wide angle lens if I didn’t have a DX-sized camera (my D2x). If you want a 50mm to frame like a 75-80mm or so, then just crop it that way.
3. This is a non-sense/temporary argument. Technology will soon render this argument moot. This is like arguing that we shouldn’t have shutter speeds above 1/2000 because the F2 can’t go any faster. Just because the F2 couldn’t do better (for the time) doesn’t mean that future cameras should be constrained by its limitations.
4. There are plenty of smaller, lighter, slow lenses with variable apertures if that’s really what you’re after. I’ll take the best image quality I can afford, thanks.
5. These guys will, hopefully, mature into a different way of thinking with time.

For me- Nikon (I believe temporarily) took something away from us all- the proper field of view for all the lenses we’ve bought and continue to buy.

Canon finally brought out a full-frame camera and got the jump on Nikon. Yeah, it’s expensive, it might have light falloff issues and with any first-gen product will continue to improve over time.

As far as we can tell at this point, Nikon doesn’t even have a horse in the race and doesn’t plan to if you listen to interviews with their Execs:

Question: Being in 2006, is there any change in your 35mm full frame camera strategy?

Answer: “It has not changed at the present time.”

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 8th, 2007 at 15:03 and is filed under Regular Post. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.