GHarris
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 p.2 #1 · Do you feel Sony should have a better flagship APS-C camera? | |
lsquare wrote:
If I use an APS-C lens on a Sony FF body, I'm assuming vignette and corner sharpness of the APS-C lenses are mitigated by the larger sensor? Focal length in APS-C mode on an FF body is the same as if the lens was on an APS-C body?
Vignette and corner sharpness comes from the lens. When you use an APS-C lens on a FF body, you can either shoot in APS-C mode - in which case it will produce identical images to if you had shot on an APS-C body, vignetting and all (because you're just using the middle part of the sensor, an APS-C crop)... or you can tell the camera to try to shoot in full frame, and you will mostly get bad results. The outer parts of the frame, that the APS-C lens was not designed to cover, will be anywhere from badly to completely vignetted (blacked out) and there will be other image quality defects.
There are some rare exceptions to this. Some APS-C zoom lenses don't vignette too extremely, in part of their zoom range, when shot on FF. But it's always a compromise and still has its flaws. The image quality results with a full frame lens end up being better.
So the only really practical reason to use an APS-C lens on a full-frame body is to shoot it in APS-C crop mode, to make your total weight and size of your camera rig smaller (than it would have been with a full frame lens attached instead), while wasting the extra image quality a full frame image would have provided you. Sometimes that's a valid trade-off. It's never "better", as such.
What you were thinking of - "won't vignetting and corner sharpness be better?" - works in the opposite direction. In general, if you use a full frame lens on an APS-C body, it will have less vignetting and better "corner" sharpness (because the corner is, really, only the midframe of the lens. And the only exception to this rule is the few lenses that have a "midframe dip", because then that midframe becomes the corner).
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The thing is, nowadays, there genuinely are small, cheap and good full frame lenses available, such that APS-C lenses are not even necessarily cheaper. As well as full-frame bodies (the A7C) that are about as small as APS-C bodies. So there are fewer and fewer reasons to choose APS-C... except for the cost of the camera body, alone. That's where there is a significant difference. Cost of the body.
Even there, you have options: a second-hand full frame body may give you better final image quality than a new APS-C body, and the used market options are extensive and cover many budgets. A budget full-frame used body will have fewer features, less speed and convenience, than a newest-model APS-C body of a similar price... so the tradeoff is about whether you need fast performance or whether you can be patient and slower about your shooting in return for a higher-quality final result. In some niches, such as sports or action shooting, fast performance and fast focus is everything, so if your budget is constrained you're forced into APS-C (which will never quite be perfect, and you'll wish you had a full-frame new model body instead with even more autofocus speed and image quality, but you'll have to make do). In other areas, such as landscape photography or posed portraiture, a slow camera body may work just fine and you may be happier with a second-hand full frame body which will provide better image quality than any APS-C camera ever will.
Edited on Aug 25, 2024 at 05:20 AM · View previous versions
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