Will the availability of Medium Format make APSC more attractive?

[KitW]

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This may sound like something of a digression, but hopefully it will make sense if you bear with me. A long time ago during a previous life as a psychologist, I attended a talk which brought up pricing schemes for computers. As a consumer, you may have a budget of £1000 and be faced with the choice of two computers. Computer A costs £500 and has 16Gb of RAM. Computer C costs £1100 and has 128Gb of RAM. Now, after rationally considering their needs, your average consumer might opt for computer A which is within their budget. However, if the manufacturer introduces a third computer with specifications and a price in between that of computer A and C e.g. Computer B with 32Gb of memory at £950, your consumer may now be more likely to opt for computer C - which clearly offers much better performance for an only marginally increased price relative to computer B. Somehow the availability of different options distorts our perceptions of value. Apparently the manufacturer doesn't even need to produce computer B - even if it is 'out of stock', its theoretical existence can nudge people towards buying a more expensive product.

Many years ago, I moved from 35mm film to an Canon 5D. It was wonderful. It felt like moving up to medium format. The low-light performance blew away my push-processed black and white films, and I started enjoying colour photography for the first time. It was clearly more camera than I needed, but I got a lot of pleasure from it. I upgraded from my 50mm 1.8 prime and 24mm prime to a 24-70mm zoom lens... and suddenly stopped taking pictures. I felt self-conscious. It was too big and heavy to carry around on a whim. So I didn't.

A Leica CL was the cure. It's small and unobtrusive and outclasses my 5D - already more camera than I needed or deserved - in almost every way. I can throw it in a backpack. I've started taking pictures again. Rationally it's a much better camera for my own needs. I find I can crop much more than with the 5D, and still get a reasonably big print.

This year YouTube keeps showing me videos of medium format cameras at surprisingly low weights and prices. A Fuji GFX100-ii weighs in at 1030g and a Fuji 45-100 F4 (equivalent 36-80 F2.8) is 1kg also. This totals just over 2kg. The camera is £5k and the lens is £1630 new. Not a whole lot more than a high-end Full-Frame camera and nice lens. Essentially in 2kg, you can have a medium format camera that blows the socks off an EOS R5 (738g) and 24-70 f2.8 (0.9kg). (Total of about 1.7kg). In contrast, as we all know, a Leica CL (403g) with a Sigma 18-50 f2.8-4 (290g) weighs just under 700g. Use the Leica 18-56 or opt for the primes, and you can keep it even lighter.

It's easy to see why consumers are swayed towards buying Full-Frame bodies when they are now only marginally bigger and more expensive than APSC and Micro-Four-Thirds bodies. But why buy second best, and get a full frame when you could get a Medium Format? Perhaps next year, 'Big Format' cameras will be announced - for only £10k you will be able to buy a 3kg package that will take 200 megapixel images that can fill billboards. And I have no doubt there will be people who will make good use of them and for whom they will be the right choice.

At some point, the availability of ever bigger, more expensive, and more capable cameras may distort the market in the opposite direction. When 'Let's get me the nicest camera I can afford' includes the option of something that looks like it could be used to take out a tank, but requires a commando to carry it, this may paradoxically increase the attractiveness of smaller more manageable models. Rather than 'second best', APSC may come to be seen as a rational choice from a wide range of options. I suspect this is perhaps why cameras such as the Fuji X100vi are becoming more popular again - there is clearly a desire for nice cameras that are a bit more manageable than some of the monsters I see being carried about.

Perhaps this is wishful thinking. I have to admit that I'm sore that the APSC format seems to be being neglected in favour of full-frame cameras. But we are not rational beings.

Edited June 16, 2024 by KitW

[lct]

It is not irrational to prefer compact gear for sure but it is even less so if the gear in question can be both compact and full frame IMHO. MF cannot compete on compactness anyway so i'm not sure what influence it can have on the market.

[jaapv]

It is irrational to chose on basis of physical size of the sensor. The right choice is to choose on basis of whether the resulting image meets the desired quality criteria. 

[pop]

vor einer Stunde schrieb jaapv:

It is irrational to chose on basis of physical size of the sensor.

Ah, I always suspected Oskar Barnack was not quite rational.

[jaapv]

Yep, that is a fine argument, but I would suggest that inventing gear is not the same as choosing gear.

[pop]

vor 1 Minute schrieb jaapv:

Yep, that is a fine argument, but I would suggest that inventing gear is not the same as choosing gear.

I think Barack would have preferred a 35mm camera over a much larger one, had it existed.

In reality, you often have to choose your gear not only on terms of the quality of the output it can produce but also on terms of ergonomy (such as luggability), cost and so on. Some even decide for the looks of the gear.

[Viv]

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On 6/16/2024 at 6:39 PM, KitW said:

This may sound like something of a digression, but hopefully it will make sense if you bear with me. A long time ago during a previous life as a psychologist, I attended a talk which brought up pricing schemes for computers. As a consumer, you may have a budget of £1000 and be faced with the choice of two computers. Computer A costs £500 and has 16Gb of RAM. Computer C costs £1100 and has 128Gb of RAM. Now, after rationally considering their needs, your average consumer might opt for computer A which is within their budget. However, if the manufacturer introduces a third computer with specifications and a price in between that of computer A and C e.g. Computer B with 32Gb of memory at £950, your consumer may now be more likely to opt for computer C - which clearly offers much better performance for an only marginally increased price relative to computer B. Somehow the availability of different options distorts our perceptions of value. Apparently the manufacturer doesn't even need to produce computer B - even if it is 'out of stock', its theoretical existence can nudge people towards buying a more expensive product.

Many years ago, I moved from 35mm film to an Canon 5D. It was wonderful. It felt like moving up to medium format. The low-light performance blew away my push-processed black and white films, and I started enjoying colour photography for the first time. It was clearly more camera than I needed, but I got a lot of pleasure from it. I upgraded from my 50mm 1.8 prime and 24mm prime to a 24-70mm zoom lens... and suddenly stopped taking pictures. I felt self-conscious. It was too big and heavy to carry around on a whim. So I didn't.

A Leica CL was the cure. It's small and unobtrusive and outclasses my 5D - already more camera than I needed or deserved - in almost every way. I can throw it in a backpack. I've started taking pictures again. Rationally it's a much better camera for my own needs. I find I can crop much more than with the 5D, and still get a reasonably big print.

This year YouTube keeps showing me videos of medium format cameras at surprisingly low weights and prices. A Fuji GFX100-ii weighs in at 1030g and a Fuji 45-100 F4 (equivalent 36-80 F2.8) is 1kg also. This totals just over 2kg. The camera is £5k and the lens is £1630 new. Not a whole lot more than a high-end Full-Frame camera and nice lens. Essentially in 2kg, you can have a medium format camera that blows the socks off an EOS R5 (738g) and 24-70 f2.8 (0.9kg). (Total of about 1.7kg). In contrast, as we all know, a Leica CL (403g) with a Sigma 18-50 f2.8-4 (290g) weighs just under 700g. Use the Leica 18-56 or opt for the primes, and you can keep it even lighter.

It's easy to see why consumers are swayed towards buying Full-Frame bodies when they are now only marginally bigger and more expensive than APSC and Micro-Four-Thirds bodies. But why buy second best, and get a full frame when you could get a Medium Format? Perhaps next year, 'Big Format' cameras will be announced - for only £10k you will be able to buy a 3kg package that will take 200 megapixel images that can fill billboards. And I have no doubt there will be people who will make good use of them and for whom they will be the right choice.

At some point, the availability of ever bigger, more expensive, and more capable cameras may distort the market in the opposite direction. When 'Let's get me the nicest camera I can afford' includes the option of something that looks like it could be used to take out a tank, but requires a commando to carry it, this may paradoxically increase the attractiveness of smaller more manageable models. Rather than 'second best', APSC may come to be seen as a rational choice from a wide range of options. I suspect this is perhaps why cameras such as the Fuji X100vi are becoming more popular again - there is clearly a desire for nice cameras that are a bit more manageable than some of the monsters I see being carried about.

Perhaps this is wishful thinking. I have to admit that I'm sore that the APSC format seems to be being neglected in favour of full-frame cameras. But we are not rational beings.

I have both the Leica CL and the Hasselblad X2D 100C.

They are both wonderful cameras. I use only prime lenses on both.

I also regret that Leica continues to neglect the APS-C format.

[jaapv]

26 minutes ago, pop said:

I think Barack would have preferred a 35mm camera over a much larger one, had it existed.

In reality, you often have to choose your gear not only on terms of the quality of the output it can produce but also on terms of ergonomy (such as luggability), cost and so on. Some even decide for the looks of the gear.

Of course. But that does not link 1:1 to sensor size. You can choose for a compact high quality camera but that does not mean it has a FF or APS sensor. Or such. For instance my CL is less hefty than my MFT GX8. 
Barnack chose the film size to fit the camera, not the other way around. 

[pop]

vor 41 Minuten schrieb jaapv:

Barnack chose the film size to fit the camera, not the other way around.

Actually, Barnack constructed the miniature camera to hold the 35mm film he already had and used for his movie camera.

[lct]

Beauty of FF is that it lets me use either FF lenses or APS ones in crop mode if the sensor has sufficient resolution.

[Anbaric]

My guess is that medium format, which will always be a niche product, will have no measurable impact on the popularity of APS-C. Leica have neglected it for their own reasons, probably because it wasn't selling well enough. Fuji have an interesting strategy, though - their (very successful) mainstream cameras are APS-C, and then they jump straight to medium format GFX, so there's a sharp division between the two product lines. It may be harder to justify supporting three formats, especially for a company like Leica. Apart from Fuji, APS-C cameras with interchangeable lenses tend to be entry-level alternatives to a camera company's 'professional' range, like Nikon's DX SLRs or cheaper Z series cameras, and Leica doesn't really do entry level these days. And you can, if you choose, make 'full frame' cameras pretty small, like the Sony a7C (not to mention all those tiny 35mm compacts, or for that matter a Leica II/III).