----- Original Message ----- From: "John Francis" Subject: Re: image circle of DA lenses: how much smaller than FF?
> > Above some focal length (well below 200mm) it's likely that just about > any lens will have an image circle easily large enough to cover 36x24mm. > But, as Ned Bunnell point out in his blog entry on the forthcoming camera, > there's a difference between covering an image circle and covering it > well. > The DA lenses are not designed for sensors of that size, so things such as > corner resolution, distortion, etc. may not be sufficiently high. > (There again, as he also mentions, some older lenses may also fall short > in that regard, even though they were designed for use on film cameras). There has been a rather protracted and sometimes heated debate about this on ForumNeurotica over the past day or two. The best arguement that the naysayers can come up with is that wide open corner performance isn't good enough on some lenses, so the entire full frame sensor idea must be wrong. The worst argument that they've been able to make is the old Pentax is a small company that can't afford it, the market is too small, blah blah blah.... The more sensible people are of the opinion that stopping down a bit will cure most problems, that some lenses don't perform well, but others do, proving only that some lenses are better than others, and that Nikon, Canon and Sony seem to be doing fairly well making 35mm full frame DSLR cameras, and that there seems to be a lot of people adapting full frame Pentax lenss to their digital EOS cameras and getting good results. It looks to me like Ned is saying what he is being told to say by his political masters, and not what he might say as a photographer. Perhaps the whole Leica D-Lux fiasco caused Pentax to rein in their wild horse a little, and got him start talking more like the president of a camera company. William Robb -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
