Looking for something totally else, I came across this spreadsheet on my hard drive: a spreadsheet comparing the field of view of various lenses on each of these 3 Pentax systems: K-1, APS-C, and 645Z. No new information, nothing that most of us don’t already know about how various lenses behave in combination with various sensors, but I found it useful to lay it out this way to be able to visually compare.
Dropbox link here to a pdf of the single page spreadsheet: https://www.dropbox.com/s/qn2tzf43nh77n1q/Lens%20FOV%20Comparison.pdf?dl=0 Background: Last summer I spent a lot of time and effort in preparation for a trip to Alaska. I have traveled to many places, I travel often, but the Alaska trip was still a big big thing for me. I knew I would be putting myself in position to capture some memorable photos. No guarantees that the weather would cooperate, that luggage wouldn’t get lost, that travel wouldn’t be disrupted, etc. But I wanted to do what I could ahead of time to make be sure that I had the best possible photo gear to be able to take advantage of whatever photo opportunities might present themselves. So part of my planning and preparation was to think through the sort of scenes I might have, and to previsualize THE shots I would take. At the time, summer of 2016, I had three camera systems: K-3 APS-C, K-1 full frame, and 645Z. Plus a variety of lenses for each system. There was no way I was going to travel with everything, (and there was no way that everything I did take to Alaska would be with me on every field trip I might take) and so I spent quite a bit of time thinking about which camera body/lens combination would work best for various expected situations. As part of that process I found some resources on the web which calculated the effective field of view for lenses of a given focal length paired with various sensor sizes. From those resources I pulled information about lenses I had or might conceivably acquire and created the linked spreadsheet. Note that the Field of View in degrees (FOV°) as often used will typically refer to the diagonal dimension of the sensor - I chose instead to look at the horizontal FOV° because that was more meaningful for me as I tried to visualize various scenes. In the end I took all three systems with a subset of the lenses. I convinced my wife to use the K-3 as her primary camera in lieu of her Leica P&S she usually uses. So, one less for me to carry, but available as a backup if needed. I used the K-1 as my primary, with the 645Z along mostly for a few selected landscape shots. I have since sold all of my APS-C gear and most of the 645Z system (still have one lens to sell). I think the linked spreadsheet nicely illustrates the major advantage of the full frame vs the other two systems: availability of lenses. Neither 645 nor APS-C provides the option of significant wide angle. Yes, I will grant that the 1.5x crop-factor on the APS-C is nice when trying to capture wildlife a few hundred yards away, but the DA*400/5.6 on my K-1, with images cropped in post processing, helped to full that niche. And I will grant that the size and weight of the K-1 vs. K-3 and other APS-C options can weigh heavily (pun intended) in favor of the smaller lighter system. But for me I will put up with the weight and bulk in order to be able to obtain a better selection of lenses within the FOV range that I prefer to shoot. stan -- 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.
