Battle of the formats Full Frame vs Micro Four Thirds Round 1, 29 March 2019

This is the first of an occasional series of posts  which I intend to publish comparing full frame and micro four thirds mirrorless interchangeable lens camera systems.

For readers in a hurry who just want the summary, here it is:

As Peggy Lee sang in 1969,

Peggy Lee was fifty years early for the FF vs M43 debate but she got it right anyway.

Here is another version of the debate. This has been attributed to Francis Bacon who was born in 1561 so maybe he had a time travel machine. Not to worry, the message is timeless.

Humans love to quarrel about every little thing. The goal of the exercise is to perpetuate the argument not to bring it to any sort of conclusion.  Were that to occur a new and perhaps less appealing topic must be found. And with that new lines of argument must be learned and refined.

The combatants really hate it when some po-faced busybody spoils their fun with conclusive evidence that one side (or neither) has it right. 

Most of the arguments for and against various camera formats are like those of the mediaeval sages arguing about a horse’s teeth.   

They are often theoretical and distant from the world of actual pictures.

Or they rely on facts which while true are not pertinent to the appearance of actual pictures.

The main argument for larger sensors is that they deliver a higher signal/noise ratio than smaller sensors, given equal sensor technology.

This manifests in pictures as lower luminance noise at high ISO settings and usually higher dynamic range although that is not always so, as shown on the little table below.

We can investigate the numbers at sensor test sources such as DXO Mark and PhotonstoPhotos.

I have chosen to use the Panasonic Lumix G85 as my M43 model and the Canon EOS RP for full frame.

Each of these cameras uses the manufacturers second rank sensor. Although the RP is a recent release the sensor inside it is not. The point of this is that each sensor is at approximately the same stage of evolution, making them comparable for practical purposes.

Here are the numbers from DXOMark. The EOS RP uses the same sensor as the 6D.2.

The Dynamic Range score refers to best DR at low ISO. You can see the smaller sensor is better here, but the larger sensor has more DR at high IO settings.

Let’s look at the ISO score. You can read more about what this represents at  dxomark.com.

But basically the larger number is better and a one EV step advantage is represented by doubling the number. 

Taking the G85, 656 x 2=1312 x 2=2624.

So we can see the RP has about a 2 EV step advantage over the G85 in high ISO performance. This is readily confirmed by simple comparison tests using actual photographs.

So if we have a subject which requires say, 1/60sec at f4 and ISO 3200 for correct exposure and we use that exposure with each camera we will get two correctly exposed pictures which show:

1. The one from the larger sensor has more background blur.

2. The one from the larger sensor has less noise.

Debate over, right ?  Larger is better. Done deal ?

The answer to that proposition is maybe, depending on the way you want to render that background.

If that blur is how you want to render the scene,  the larger sensor works well.

But what if you want everything sharp ?  Not everybody subscribes to the current fashion of rendering everything except the subject’s left eye out of focus.

To render the background with equal sharpness to that produced by the M43 camera you have to close down the lens aperture 2 stops, in this case from f4 to f8. This in turn requires an increase in ISO setting from 3200 to 12800.

This is like a dog chasing its tail.

Now the larger sensor makes a picture which looks just like the one from the smaller sensor with about the same depth of field and the same amount of luminance noise.

For practical photographic purposes the larger sensor only delivers less noise if it is also allowed to deliver less depth of field.

Is it possible for M43 to deliver shallow depth of field like full frame ?

For practical photographic purposes, yes.

The M43 system has a very large range of lenses some specifically designed for portraiture which is a common situation in which photographers want to blur out that fussy background.

There are 42.5mm (equivalent to 85mm in full frame) f1.7 and f1.2 lenses which can deliver very shallow depth of field. They are sharp wide open for that purpose.

Former president of the U.S.A. Bill Clinton liked to say…..”it’s the economy, stupid”, believing he or at least his campaign manager Ragin Cajun Carville had identified the issue about which voters were most concerned.

In marketing the mantra is …”it’s the brand name, stupid”.

Potential camera buyers are confronted by a blizzard of information, promotional blurb and claims about various cameras none of which they can comprehend, which is not surprising since most of the camera makers’ promotional  material is entirely incomprehensible.

So buyers do what buyers usually do which is choose the brand name they best recognise.

In the contest of brand names the M43 system has some big hurdles to overcome.

It seems to me this issue devolves itself into two parts:

1. The brand name of the camera maker.

2. The name generally used for the size of the sensor.

The most recognised camera brands are Canon and Nikon with Sony looking to push both of them off center stage.

Over many years Panasonic gained a good reputation as a maker of household appliances,  in the process partly rebranding from National Panasonic  to just Panasonic.

When they entered the camera market Panasonic decided to run with the sub-brand name Lumix.  I suspect this to have been a play on the Leica  brand given Panasonic’s ongoing relationship with Leica.  

Leica cameras have the Leica “L” red dot on the front of the body, some Lumix cameras have a yellow “L” sign like a Pound Sterling on the lower right corner as you look at the front of the camera. Except increasing numbers of Lumix cameras do not have the Lumix L at all, particularly the higher end ones.

Anyway in my view it was a marketing mis-step. Eleven years later hardly anybody of my acquaintance is aware that Lumix is a brand of camera.

But pretty much everybody knows that Canon and Nikon are camera brands with a long history in the business.

Now we come to the sensor.

Way back in the good old days proper photographers used proper cameras which meant either 4x5 inch large format which used a sheet of film about the size of your hand  (12,500 mm²) or a Rollieflex which used medium format film to produce a square negative  56 x 56mm in size (3,136 mm²).

Then camera makers realised they could use 35mm wide double sprocket movie film in a still camera.

This became known as the miniature format   with a frame size of 24 x 36mm giving an area of  864 mm².  Later the term “35mm” came to describe the type of camera and the film size.

There was also a sub-miniature format using 16mm movie film or smaller. The Minox spy cameras used this format producing an 8 x 11mm negative (88 mm²).

Then along came the digital revolution and a decision by camera makers to take leave of their collective senses when it came to identifying the size of the sensor in a digital camera.

They made the bizarre decision to refer to the diameter of the Vidicon tube (look it up) which would have been required (if anybody still used vidicon tubes which they do not) to house the sensor being referenced. This is different from and bears no fixed relationship to the size of the sensor itself. They then decided to present this diameter in inches and fractions of inches, but use the inverse when the number is less than 1.  

Under this completely nonsensical system the 13 x 17.3mm  sensor with a diagonal of 21.6mm was called “Four Thirds”

At the same time the old 24x36mm sensor size came to be known as “Full frame” and smaller sensors, mainly with a diagonal of 27-28mm were referred to as “crop sensors”.

But wait, it gets worse. When Panasonic and Olympus introduced the first mirrorless interchangeable lens format in 2008 they wanted to emphasize that cameras and lenses based on the new format could be considerably smaller than the mostly 27-28mm DSLRs of the day.

So in an act of marketing madness they decided to call the new format Micro Four Thirds.

Now they are stuck with this name which is meaningless, perhaps in itself not a particularly big problem but more pressing is that the name conveys no positive marketing message.

They might have been better advised to give the system and its sensor a completely made-up name, the way drug companies and car makers do, for instance Lexus, Acura.

As noted above, Panasonic did come up with the name LUMIX which has only five letters, sounds vaguely sharp and strong and might have been a good name for the new mirrorless system and sensor. 

But in another strange decision Panasonic used the Lumix name for nothing in particular. They applied it in  haphazard fashion, referring to their own cameras sometimes as Panasonic and sometimes Lumix, thereby managing to confuse everybody.

M43 could have been the Lumix system had Panasonic played their hand differently.

You see the over-the-counter selling problem. Customer comes in to the shop, says to the sales person “what camera should I buy” ?  Sales person says you can have this one which is full frame or that other one which is micro something.

For the unsophisticated buyer full frame very likely sounds like the real deal and comes with a recognised brand and maybe worth the extra cost over that micro-something with an unknown brand.

The really daft thing about all this is that for the majority of enthusiast or even professional users and for the great majority of photographic situations the M43 system delivers better specifications, features, capabilities,  performance and picture quality  than low to mid range full frame cameras in a smaller package at a considerably lower price point.

What’s not to like about M43 ?

Nothing.

M43 has a marketing challenge which Panasonic and Olympus need to tackle head-on.

I believe that if interchangeable lens camera systems are to have a future then M43 is best positioned to meet the needs of most enthusiast/expert/professional photographers in the great majority of circumstances.

Full frame is overkill for everything but the very highest level of professional demands and even then top tier M43 cameras and lenses will generally do the job just fine.