Brendan MacRae <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > First of all, from what I've seen, larger sensors > produce better images. Call it BS if you want, but why > on earth would a company make a camera with a larger > sensor if there was no noticeable increase in image > quality. Oh, and then charge three times as much for > it!
There's some fairly simple math that says they the images should be better with a larger sensor, other things being equal which they never are of course. Sensor area goes up as the square of the linear size, so a full frame sensor has roughly 1.6*1.6 ~= 2.56 times the area of an APS C sensor with 1.6 crop factor and 4 times the area of a 4/3 sensor. You could be more exact, taking actual sensor dimensions, but it's likely not worth the trouble. So if you used the same area per pixel as a 10 Mp APS-C, e.g. K10D, a 5D would have about 25 Mp. With pixels the size used on the Olympus 510D, it would have about 40. It doesn't; it has 13. Those have two to three times the area per pixel that smaller sensors use. So it has more Mp than most competitors; assuming the lenses are good, that should mean more resolution. Perhaps more important, it has more surface area per pixel by a significant margin. Assuming the chip technology is comparable, that could give wider dynamic range, better high-ISO performance, or a bit of each. For some shooters, being able to use lenses like the 24/1.4 without having it lose much of its wideness would also be a reason for a 5d. AFAIK, there's nothing comparable for small sensor cameras. I probably will not buy a 5D; it is too expensive and too heavy to suit me. But it does seem to have obvious advantages. -- Sandy Harris Quanzhou, Fujian, China -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List PDML@pdml.net http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net
