Pure speculation: Medium format fuji

Commenting on fujirumors post:Medium format Fujifilm

Fujirumors has a source saying Fujifilm will release a digital medium format interchangeable lens camera by September. Take it with a grain of salt is also added for good measures. First, ill tell you why that grain should be a ton and then we can have some fun speculating.

There are numerous reasons why this is highly unlikely. 

1. Fujifilm, just a week ago, said that they are looking into the market, but hasnt even found a sensor yet. It takes more than half a year to develop a camera.
2. Their camera developers should now be fully comitted to the final stages of the x-t2 project. In theori they could allready be done, but when did such a project ever finish early?
3. The medium format market is both a small and a risky one. Fuji has allready found a way of making safe money in that market. They manufacture the Hasselblad lenses. Fuji may be oddballs simetimes, but they are not really really stupid. No one in their right mind would risk that relationship by competing with their partner.
4. Who would the customers be? An aps-c xpro2 is $1800 or so. Let's say they could sell a camparable MF camera plus a good kit lens for slightly below $10000. No way enough people would buy it to make the production profitable.

Speculations

If Fuji is indeed, dispite how unlikely it is, going to launch a digital medium format interchangeable lens camera by September, what can have prompted it? I have a few suggestions. 

1. It's a rebranded Hasselblad for the Japanese market, just like the GX645AF was. 
2. The deal with Hasselblad is coming to an end.
3. They are now confident that the organic sensor will work and will change the game. Having a medium format system in production when it eventually arrives, would maybe make some sense.
4. Sony's sensor division has given Fuji an offer they can't resist. A deal to get a very nice price on MF sensors in return from staying away from full frame 24x36mm could be a candidate. Or if Sony's purchase of Toshibas sensor department brought a product without any customer.
5. The camera is so different that it will not compete on the same market as Hasselblad does. GA645 style point and shoot, TLR, Folder, GX680 monster or whatever.
6. The camera is something that will increase Hasselblad profit as well. Compatible with H system, but not competing with it. I cant really come up with a good candidate, but maybe Fujifilm has.
7. It's really really odd. Let's say a big plastic instax with a built in scanner instead of a sensor. Wouldnt cost much to buy but every picture would be $1 and there would be a few minutes delay for the instax to develop before its scanned.
8. There is a slight error with "digital medium format interchangeable lens camera". Take away digital or interchangable. A realaunch of a 6x7 folding film camera or a medium format x100 makes a lote more sense
9. Someone at Fuji came up with a real game changer.

Most likely, however, this rumor is nothing but a rumor.

Pure speculations: When are Canon and Nikon coming to the mirrorless market?

Pure speculations: When are Canon and Nikon coming to the mirrorless market?

There are a lot of speculation going on about when Nikon and Canon will enter the mirrorless market. Most people seem to forget that its only 20% of a market that Nikon and Canon allready share 80% and that the ramaining 20% is a hornets nest of inverstment with Sony, Fujifilm, Olympus and so on, realeasing cameras and lenses on the double. 

Thus,  i can't really tell you how it will happen and when it will happen. But there is one thing i can tell you for sure. That is how they dont want it to happen. There is no way Nikon or Canon would like to jeopardise their combined 80% market share by helping Sony, Olympus and Fujifilm close the gap between mirrorless and DSLR in peoples minds. 

Nikon and Canon has very successfully imprinted in the consumers that "full frame" is the future. It's a powerfull meme that the m43 brands and Fujifilm has to fight every day. If that somehow was broken, smaller cameras would be a threat to them and they may want to compete. Likewise, if Sony managed to start making cameras and lenses that appeal to photographers as well as techies, that may do the trick. One of them may or may not loose their nerves as mirrorless slowly grow, but in the end, its not up to Canon and Nikon, but the actors on the mirrorless market to show that its a part of the market worth competing in.

Facts: Twice the size

Twice the size

Facts and myths about film/sensor size

The camera industry likes it neat, there are a lot of different negative/sensor sizes used, but most of the popular ones are twice the size of its smaller sibling and half the size of its big brother. For interchangeable lens cameras of today, most use one of these formats: m43, aps-c, 24x36, 645, 6x9, 4x5, 5x7, 8x10. There are variatations, discrepanses and odd formats, for example 6x6 is very polular and there are both smaller and larger formats too, but lets ignore them for a while. Dispite all the different names and units used in those formats, they form a nice scale of approximately twice the size.

Today, the internet is full of people advocating aps-c over m43 and full frame 24x36 over aps-c. Most of them usually start with the notion that bigger is better and then try to learn the technical arguments for that and the counter side usually argues weight and price in favour of the smaller gear. The truth is that those formats are discussed for no ohter reason than that the industy can make them for a reasonable price right now. But does it really matter if the the film/sensor is twice as large? What does it do to the picture? I’ll try to answer those questions without advocating for or against any format.

I will begin with a mind experiment. Picture yourself camera A and camera B, both of them are rigged to take a picture into identical dollhouses. The cameras look and work exactly the same, with one exception, size. Camera A is exactly twice the size of B, by area scale. Both lens, film, even the release button, everything are proposionally smaller. The film/sensor is thus half the size B compared to A. Now picture that the dollhouse which camera B is taking a picture of is scaled down exactly as much as the camera. What would this do to the pictures taken by camera A and B?

The answer is, apart from that the picture in camera B would look one stop darker (since the aperture is scaled down to half the size too), there would be no difference at all between the pictures of camera A and camera B. Compensate with twice the time, iso or twice as much light and the pictures would be identical. (Actually there is a quatum effect called diffraction would slightly affect the sharpness of the image, but that is beyond the scope of this article).

This is actually very intuitive and i will not even bother going into the technical details of why. Instead, lets analyze the consequences of this for a few photographic properties. Field of view, exposure, depth of field and bokeh.

Field of view

Obviously one can make a lens for a camera with twice the film/sensor size that has the same field of view as its smaller sibling. Translated into camera tech would be shorter focal length which is usually measured in mm. The formula is very simple, if you make the film/sensor twice as big, you need to multiply the focal length with 1.5 for achieve the same field of view. A 60mm lens on a 6x4.5cm camere has the same field of view as a 90mm lens on a 6x9cm camera. The same goes for m43 vs aps-c and aps-c vs 24x36mm.

Exposure

This is even simpler. If the time and aperture is the same, the exposure will be the same regardless of sensor size, as long as the iso is the same. In the dollhouse example, camera B needs more iso to get the same picture only because the aperture gets one stop smaller as well as the film.

With that said, a twice the size film/sensor will have twice the amount of light to gather information from. That means it is easier to build a sensor with higher iso sensitivity if it is larger. At the same time, large sensors are a lot more expensive to make.

Depth of field

This is where most of the internet gets it wrong for real. You can read any number of sites that sais a 35/1.4 lens on a aps-c (18x24mm) camera has the same depth of field as a 52/2 lens on a full frame (24x36mm) camera. This is a simplification to try to explain something complicated in technical terms instead of exploring what it really does for a photographer.

Lets go back to the dollhouse. The pictures from camera A and B has the same field of view even though the film/sensor size is twice the size. Thus, A have to have 1.5 the focal lenght of camera B. If the area of the film/sensor is twice the size then the area of the aperture has to be twice the size too. Twice the aperture size equals one stop. So lets use the 35/1.4 and 52/2 example above. But how can the depth of field be the same if the smaller dollhouse looks exactly the same on the picture from camera B as the larger one does on the picture from camera A? Stop and think about this for a moment or two!

Well, you are right! It is not the same and this is where the size of the film/sensor really start to make a difference for the pictures taken. It is really stupid to try to convince people that it is too. Just consider this: The infinity on a 35/1.4 is at 35m and the infinity of a 50/2 is at 50m (regardless of film/sensor size). That means at 40m the 35mm has infinite DOF while the 50mm has a limited DOF. Thus they are not the same and anyone trying to tell you that is most likely repeating a miss leading simplification read on the internet. What is true is that you need a larger aperture to achieve the same field of view on a shorter lens than on a longer. How much larger, and if it is even possible, depends on how far away your subject is. If you are about to take a close-up poirtrait, you might not need a larger aperture at all and if you are close to infinity focus, it may not be possible to achieve the same short DOF whatever you do.

Bokeh

The quality of the out of focus part of the picture is very much a question of taste. But when it comes to film/sensor size there are absolutes that really shapes the look of the oof part of the picture. Once again, lets go back to the dollhouse. Lets imagine the there is a living room in the dollhouses to which the cameras point. There is a table in focus, a sofa behind it slightly out of focus and behind that a wall that is very out of focus. Keep in mind that the pictures look just the same even though one dollhouse is smaller than the other. A smaller dollhouse means shorter distance between the table, the sofa and the wall, they still look the same.

Yes, smaller film/sensor sizes with a lens with the same field of view needs a shorter distance to give the same amount of loss of focus than a larger camera. WTF, why didnt anyone tell you that? Maybe they simply didnt know or they were trying to explain it from a technical point of view rather than a photography point of view.

This bears consequences. Lets introduce camera C and D. Camera C has twice the film/sensor size as camera D but also have a shorter lens so that the FOV are the same. It also have a larger aperture so that the depht of field is the same at the distance of our subject. In this case, we shoot the same subject with both cameras, a car from the front but slightly from one side. Behind the car there is a road that stretches through the landscape to the horizon. The DOF stretches so that the car is in focus, but the road is behind it is not. The in focus part of the picture will look just the same with both camera C and D, but the out of focus area will look a quite different. Since camera D has a smaller film/sensor size it need a shorter distans to go from slightly out of focus to completely blurred out than camera C, for the same FOV and DOF. The separatoin between the subject (the car) and the backround will be greater. The landscape at the horizon may even be blurred out completely with camera D, where you could still see mountain tops with camera C. On the other hand if you were not going for separation but for the feel of how long the road is and how far away the mountains are, camera C may do the trick for you.

This is why (apart from the detail and resolution) large and meduim format photographs have a different look than small frame photos. Once you learn to recogize that look you can choose what film/sensor size is suitable for the picture you plan to take. Or if you you are going to buy a new camera, what film/sensor style suites your style of photography best. Can you emulate this look on a smaller frame camera. Yes and no, you can use a longer lens and walk back so that you capture the same scene, but it would also change the perspective and give you the "i rather zoom than take the picture from the right distance" look.