Bali Photographer / Thoughts and Portfolio

Why would you haul a heavy professional lens only to use a half of it? Why would you spend a fortune for ultra-wide lens only to go as short as normal lenses do? Don’t you think it a waste of energy and money? You may start wondering what I am talking about. Right, I am actually repeating words thrown by a number of professional photographers about using a cropped digital sensor.

To cut the production cost and make consumer DSLR more affordable, manufacturers produce smaller image sensor, which then getting popular as DSLR with crop factor. Practically it is just as simple as cropping a small fraction in the middle of standard-sized sensor. Standard sensor size is 35mm, the normal standard of film size.

Following is sensor dimension of Canon and Nikon cameras:
Nikon DX (crop factor 1.5) 23.6 x 15.8mm
Nikon FX (full frame) 36 x 23.9mm
Canon (crop factor 1.6) 22.2 x 14.8mm
Canon (full frame) 35.8 x 23.9mm

Considering that cropped sensor is only using a small fraction of the image, manufacturers are cutting the price even more, making consumer DSLR price even more attractive, by producing smaller lens. These lenses do not work on full frame as they can only yield as small image as the cropped sensor can collect.

With the spirit of cost saving, it is very much understandable that both optical and construction quality are adjusted accordingly. It forces keen enthusiasts using cropped DSLR to use professional full frame lenses to benefit from their professional optical excellence, by technically wasting a significant part of its result cropped out. It is actually a waste of energy and money as professional full frame lenses are significantly heavier and a lot more expensive.

An additional waste comes on ultra wide photography. Cropping our collected image, ultra wide lenses result in similar images as longer ones. 14mm lens on Nikon’s 1.5 cropped DSLR results in similar image as 21mm on full frame lens. Price of 14mm (F2.8) lens is roughly $1,200 whilst 20mm lens (the same maximum aperture) costs only $500.

Ignoring all other full frame benefits, using full frame saves $700 for similar (even slightly wide) images, or you may still spend it for extremely wider results.