Marsu42 said:
jrista said:
More important than now much noise you have, though, is the simple fact that smaller pixels resolve more detail. More reach is all about detail.
Excellent analysis, and you didn't even mention dr once
... esp. the drop in af system capabilities of the 5d3 with slower lenses is often forgotten, it's not like Canon is very verbal about announcing this fact.
Alas, the crop 18mp 7d1 af vs. ff "wisdom" has been passed down the generations for years, and now that at last a Canon crop camera with a top-notch af system and ~1/2+ better iso is here it'll take some time for people to adjust.
Just one note: The resolution of the "small pixels" demands a very good lens. I remember you stating that there is no "outresolving", but still, I feel with a 20mp ff you can slap on about every ef lens around as long as you don't magnify the corners, while with crop you have to be more picky. Probably the reason why the 100-400L2 appears now.
I do believe that good glass matters, however I don't really think it matters more on crop than FF. I mean, people buy $10k lenses to use on FF cameras for the same reason...to get the most out of the format. You can try to use a 400mm lens on a 5D III for birds, but at that focal length, you have to get very close to get the most out of the system. On the flip side, a 400mm lens is an effective 640mm FoV on a 7D II. Just from a "filling the frame" standpoint, that makes it a lot easier to do just that, fill the frame, and get as many pixels as possible on target (which is ultimately where both lower noise and more detail is going to come from.)
Then you still have that added benefit of the potential for a faster aperture, which means potentially better AF, and therefor sharper results (I do notice that AF slows down on my 5D III with the 1.4x TC...it doesn't seem like it slows down a ton, but just enough to be a little frustrating).
I think the whole "you need a better lens" thing is itself
mostly a myth. For one, particularly with Canon, the old 100-400mm is definitely not up to snuff by todays standards, or even yesterdays standards. It's a 1990's lens design, which was still back in the film era. I still have that lens (really need to sell it), and it was sent into Canon once for tuning, and even after that...at f/5.6 that lens is very soft, and it doesn't really sharpen up until at a minimum f/7.1-f/8. I still don't think it's critically sharp at f/8, and beyond that your into diffraction limited territory, so you just can't ever get the most out of such a lens. I think the very, very common pairing of the 100-400 with the 7D has in large part helped to create a deeper myth about how poorly the 7D (which then translated to all crop cameras) could resolve detail.
Once I started pairing other lenses with the 7D, including the 100mm macro, the 50mm f/1.4, and a few other lenses I've rented over the years, I realized that you can get critically sharp results with the 7D pretty easily. Often even hand-held. Yet every time I put my 100-400mm lens on it, I just never felt as though I was getting the kind of sharpness I knew the camera could deliver. (I also feel similar about the 16-35mm f/2.8 L II...I just never feel like I am getting enough out of that lens to even get the best sharpness on the 5D III, let alone the 7D.) It wasn't most lenses that had problems...it was really just that a small specific few lens that had problems.
With 4-stop IS, fast primes and even fast zooms (24-70 f/2.8, 70-200 f/2.8, etc.), getting critically sharp results in a tripod is a no-brainer, and getting critically sharp results hand-held does not really require special equipment. It requires a little bit of technique...however I believe, especially if you want to use all the pixels that FF cameras offer, that you need that same technique when hand-holding with FF as well.
