Was wondering if the owners of the a7iii use crop mode much? I posted in a separate topic that I'm debating on which lenses to get for a growing family, and one of the lenses I'm considering is the 24mm 1.4 GM. I was thinking it would be a nice focal length and to have the ability to use crop mode to get me to the 36mm focal length would be nice. I haven't really used crop mode much but was wondering what the others experiences have been.
Sometimes I wish I would have gotten the a7riii so I wouldn't question using crop mode with such high MP.
What do you do with the photos? 10MP (24MP cropped) is still enough for an 8x10 at 300DPI. Even an 11x14 is 242DPI and most people won’t notice (or scale it up in Adobe which does a good job anyway). In short I wouldn’t hesitate especially for family use.
Mathieu18 wrote:
What do you do with the photos? 10MP (24MP cropped) is still enough for an 8x10 at 300DPI. Even an 11x14 is 242DPI and most people won’t notice (or scale it up in Adobe which does a good job anyway). In short I wouldn’t hesitate especially for family use.
Yeah I don't think we would ever really print anything that big. Maybbbbbeeee an 11x14 on a super rare occasion for a canvas for the grandparents?
Then go for it. On canvas you can even drop to about 150DPI, so you’ll have all the resolution you need.
rodphoto wrote:
Yeah I don't think we would ever really print anything that big. Maybbbbbeeee an 11x14 on a super rare occasion for a canvas for the grandparents?
I've got a 20x30 I really like from the 10mp 40d. So I think you'd be OK.
I don't like to go wider than 35mn ff equivalent because of the distortion. I suppose it can be corrected in pp though. I'd go more tele for people, I've used the 55-250 on canon aps a lot. Depending on what you are shooting though. I'd use 35mm ff equivalent more for groups
I've just been playing around with Nokton 40mm f/1.2 in crop mode with Sony A7III. I had the leica-mount version when I had a fuji and I really fell in love with that cropped 60mm eqv. length as a "portrait-normal". As it happens, with crop mode I can bring that back with A7III as well and I'm planning on buying the A6000 for almost just that purpose (to use my FF lenses on crop). The way Nokton renders when cropped is pretty magical.
The thing with crop mode is that it's way easier to frame the images (like portraits) properly in advance using the crop mode, rather than quessing and then cropping in post. And the 3960px long side is more than enough for my purposes and that lens is really sharp in the aps-c frame area even wide open. And even with Fuji I always resized to 4000px (long side) since there was never need to have larger images. Those were more than enough for my friend who printed the images I took on her birthdays last year with Fuji and Nokton, as a book. Could do it again, even with Sony. Looked gorgeous.
Also just tried using the ultra-cheap (60€) Meike 35mm f/1.7 lens on my Sony (aps-c lens). Pretty much perfect little nifty-fifty with great manual feel and good enough IQ for the 10Mp crop mode. Here's some test shots if you're interested. This resolution is more than good enough for my daily snaps and "family album" kind of use.
So yes, crop mode is pretty fun to have. And useful for many purposes. It's so easy to get obsessed about megapixels. But the truth is that when we went over 10 megapixes, we rarely need any of those extra pixels, except in rare cases when we need to crop.
There is also "Clear Image Zoom", I never did a direct side by side to compare the image quality but I used it a couple of times when I still had the a7s and sigma 18-35 combo.
Used crop mode on my A7iii a lot with the Minolta 100-300 APO D when visiting a wetlands wildlife sanctuary (many different species of birds) and the 450mm range really came in handy. The images of 10 MP were still excellent. I don't tend to use crop mode with my other lenses (no particular reason) , so for me it comes in handy mostly for those already longer FL's.
Is the full image recorded in the raw file when shooting in crop mode in case you want to recover it later with Sony cameras?
On my Olympus, I can shoot in different aspect ratios, but the full 4:3 image is still recorded in the raw file and I can recover it later if I want to. Never played with it on my Sony.
One added bonus: you don't need to correct for vignetting as much, which is the only 'downer' on the 24 GM from what I've seen (keep in mind, it's still not that bad). Normally when you correct for vignetting and increase exposure in post, you'll get noise in the corners (using my 24-105 and 35 2.8 for reference).
Keep in mind that the effective DOF on APS-C is a little less than FF, but in my experience it's not a big deal.
