The revenge of APS
Back in olden times, when surfing the Internet was preceded by the squelch of a phone modem and required you to know the URL of the sight you wanted to go to, film manufacturers decided to make things more convenient. Not for the Internet, they didn’t see that coming, but for handling film. What they came up with was APS film and what it addressed was the loading and storage of the film. The film stayed inside the cartridge completely until loaded by the camera and was stored inside the cartridge again after being developed. People using APS film never actually saw the film itself. In creating the cartridge though they did one other significant thing and that was reduce the film size as compared to 35mm film which was and is the film size that most people are familiar with. The side effect of this reduced size is also a lowering of picture quality, especially evident when the images are enlarged beyond a certain size. Because most of these pictures where never printed larger than 5″x7″ this largely goes unnoticed.
Fast forward several years and we are now searching the Internet more effectively but not yet Googling. At this point digital photography’s is skyrocketing and film use is plummeting. APS film being the weaker of the film formats with a much smaller user base was the first to be left behind. A lot is happening within digital photography at this time, point and shoot cameras actually suck and produce inferior images and cost large sums of money. Digital SLR’s are only just becoming available and also cost large sums of money. Most DSLR’s then as now came out with either a sensor the same size as 35mm film often referred to as “full frame” or the smaller APS-c or “cropped sensor”. Why would manufacturers even bother with producing sensors the same size as the failed APS film you might ask. The reasons are mostly down to the cost of manufacturing the sensors and as it turns out the full frame ones are a lot more costly relative to there size. So in order to create a market for DSLR’s camera makers needed to bring the costs down to a point that enough people could afford them, how else could they sell lenses. I remember it was a big deal when the first sub $1000 DSLR was released in around 2006.
From day one it was clear that full frame sensors were better than APS-c ones as it had been between the two film sizes. Manufactures helped to make this clear also by putting full frame sensors in their big rugged professional cameras and APS-c sensors in their consumer offerings. And that is how it’s been for about ten years, but the thing is that sensors have been steadily improving with each new iteration and the gap in image quality between full frame and APS-c has narrowed. This may be as much a result of companies putting resources to where they feel they will get the best return. After all they are not out to produce the best camera with no concern for cost they are competing hard to stay ahead of each other in the market place. There are many more things going on in digital photography including other sensor sizes and camera forms but within the DSLR world it’s mostly about full frame and crop sensors.
So if full frame sensors result in better image quality in general then what if any advantage other than cost do crop sensors provide? Well because of there smaller size they record a narrower field of view from the same focal length lens. This is often referred to as the crop factor. This “crop factor” is roughly 1.5 times for most APS-c sensors. The result is that for example a 100mm lens on APS-c provides the same field of view as a 150mm lens on full frame. This relationship is true for any focal length so that a 300mm lens becomes equivalent to a 450mm lens on full frame. In this case it’s clearly an advantage for people wanting a long telephoto lens. The opposite is true for wide angle where what was a wide 18mm becomes equivalent to a 28mm lens on a full frame camera.
So why did I title this post revenge of APS? Well it’s been a long road but we are at a point where some of the most recent APS-c sensors can perform at the same level as full frame sensors. This may not be a universally held belief but it’s pretty easy to argue that the difference isn’t nearly what it once was. It’s true that “full frame” cameras provide a shallower depth of field, but may not be the be all end all of photography. I find myself again on the side of the argument that ends with the question. If the viewer of an image has no idea how it was made does it matter how it was made?
In a future post I will time travel back to 1996 and compare two otherwise similar cameras having the key difference that one took 35mm film and the other APS.
