Originally posted by: ElFenix
Originally posted by: Jawo
More megapixels does not equal a better camera, especially on an APS-C frame size. With my camera, 10MP is more than enough...
Why doesn't someone try to compete with Canon on the FF market? I would love to get a FF camera, but they are so frecking expensive since there's little real competition for the 5D or 1ds Mark III. Or would that be the equivelant of Napoleon's Invasion of Russia?
canon has certain advantages due to making every piece of equipment up and down the supply chain for manufacturing sensors, in addition to having the practical experience to do so. nikon and sony together have the same amount of expertise, but who knows how good they are at sharing information.
35 mm sensors are far more expensive to make than even their area suggests. iirc, it requires 3 passes of the semiconductor manufacturing machine to do so at the moment (i bet canon is hard at work at one that requires only 1 pass, however). the largest sensor you can make in one pass is the 1.3x crop in the 1D series. requiring 3 passes also makes it practically impossible to do with CCD sensors (interconnects can't line up properly or something).
Yeah. In addition:
http://www.nikondigital.org/ar...llframe_whitepaper.pdf
Under The Economics of Image Sensors:
Thin disks of silicon called ?wafers? are used as the raw material of semiconductor manufacturing. Depending upon its composition, (for example, high-resistivity silicon wafers have much greater electrical field depth -- and broader spectral response -- than low-resistivity wafers) an 8" diameter wafer could cost as much as $450 to $500, $1,000 or even $5,000. After several hundred process steps, perhaps between 400 and 600 (including, for example, thin film deposition, lithography, photoresist coating and alignment, exposure, developing, etching and cleaning), one has a wafer covered with sensors. If the sensors are APS-C size, there are about 200 of them on the wafer, depending on layout and the design of the periphery of each sensor. For APS-H, there are about 46 or so. Full-frame sensors? Just 20. Consider, too, that an 8" silicon wafer usually yields 1000 to 2000 LSI (Large-Scale Integrated) circuits. If, say, 20 areas have defects, such as dust or scratches, up to 1980 usable chips remain. With 20 large sensors on a wafer, each sensor is an easy ?target.? Damage anywhere ruins the whole sensor. 20 randomly distributed dust and scratch marks could ruin the whole batch. This means that the handling of full-frame sensors during manufacture needs to be obsessively precise, and therefore they are more expensive.
For now, appreciate that a full-frame sensor costs not three or four times, but ten, twenty or more times as much as an APS-C sensor. Here, then, is the greatest disadvantage of full-frame sensors and the greatest advantage of small sensors.
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