My 28 80 2.8L when put on my smaller sensor crops that to about 50mm. That isn't wide angle at all on a digital body unless you use a full frame sensor. I never got a 17 35 for 35mm, but maybe one day I will. I do have an 11 to 18 for the digital body for wide angle (about 17 to 28) but it wouldn't cover a full frame camera and it was about $500 or so as well. A 17 35 that would have covered would have been more flexible. I had committed to a smaller sensor body and had a need that had to be filled then when upgrading the body and lens was out of the question.
Now the original poster may have no issue with budget. If he met all of his wants, its thousands of dollars easily if not tens of thousands. For them dropping 20 thousand in camera gear may just be like me going out to McDonald's. It is also possible they may have no idea yet what kind of cost they are talking about. Compromise is always a part of the process. Even if you have all the money in the world, do you want to carry all the weight around???
-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Re: Digital camera?
From: David Dyer-Bennet <dd-b@xxxxxxxx>
Date: Tue, May 19, 2009 11:14 pm
To: List for Photo/Imaging Educators - Professionals - Students
<photoforum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
mark@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
> Well once you make this decision on make, you are committed. You will
> buy bodies, especially digital ones often, but lenses should last a
> very long time. Canon and Nikon lenses are not interchangeable so
> once you decide its not easy or cheap to switch.
>
> Full frame cameras will not hurt you with birds. Some people see that
> 1.5 or 1.6 as a multiplier, much like the effect of a teleconverter.
> That really isn't the way it works. I prefer to describe it as a crop
> factor. That's right the full frame camera will have all the same
> information as the smaller sensor and the photo is in there. Unlike
> the small sensor camera where you see the crop in the lens, with the
> full frame you would have to manually crop to get the same image, but
> its still there.
If I crop to the 1.5x factor on my D700, I've got a 5MP image instead of
a 12MP image. Sure, you can always crop from the bigger image, but
you'll then have less resolution. If he's only printing his wildlife
images small, that may not matter, but he didn't distinguish. A 12MP DX
camera like the D300 gives you the full 12MP.
>
> If you do wide angle work with landscapes, the full frame will help
> you get wide angle easier.
Yes and no. Out to 15mm, it's actually easier and cheaper to do on DX,
with one of the 10-xxmm zooms. You CAN buy a 14mm (which really is
wider than 15mm), but it's around $1500 (or $1700 I think for the
14-24/2.8 Nikkor zoom, which I hear is to die for). And you tend to get
f/4 or even f/4.5 on the DX ultra-wide zooms, and a stop faster on the
full-frame ultra-wides. But the full-frame ultra-wide costs two or
three times what the DX ultra-wide costs. If you've got existing film
ultra-wide lenses, then full frame digital is cheaper/easier since you
can continue to use them. But starting from scratch it's not so
simple. Not sure if the OP is starting from scratch or not. Given the
uncertainty on system, Canon vs. Nikon, I tend to assume he is.
--
David Dyer-Bennet, dd-b@xxxxxxxx; http://dd-b.net/
Snapshots: http://dd-b.net/dd-b/SnapshotAlbum/data/
Photos: http://dd-b.net/photography/gallery/
Dragaera: http://dragaera.info
