> > On 17 Mar 2004 at 18:54, John Forbes wrote: > > > That's true. But manufacturers have to take a bet on what they think the > > market will want, and plan accordingly. > > No one in their right mind could possibly have wanted a digital camera with a > less than full frame sensor which needed new lenses for wide angle work. > > I'm glad they didn't see fit to change the film format size each time they > introduced a K mount film body. > > Of course sensor cost contributed to their decision to us an APS sized sensor > but why try to make it a permanent fixture.
You could make exactly the same arguments against switching to 35mm instead of sticking with medium format. But that happened anyway. Nobody ever claimed that 35mm was in every way as good as 120 or 220. But it was plenty good enough for most purposes (and, in fact, superior for some aspects of photography), and a whole lot more convenient. There's no real reason that a digital camera has to share the frame size of any particular film-based camera. It's convenient to be able to use those K-mount lenses, but 24x36mm is not an immutable law of photography.
