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This image is a bit more interesting than those making up the main body of this post Canon EOS M50 with EF-M 18-150mm lens |
This question has long generated much debate on user forums and from camera reviewers.
So I ran a little test on my own gear.
I looked at the amount of information which can be transferred from a scene to the output photo.
Specifically I wanted to determine if the lens or format used made a difference to this information transfer.
I selected a highly detailed scene in bright light and photographed it using a Canon EOS-M50 with several EF-M lenses and also a Canon EOS-R with RF 24-105mm f4 L lens.
The EF-M lenses were:
* 22mm f2
* 11-22mm
* 15-45mm
* 18-150mm
All the lenses had previously been determined to be good copies.
As one of the lenses, the EF-M 22mm f2 had a fixed focal length, I set each of the zooms to the equivalent focal length which was 22mm for the EF-M lenses and 35mm for the RF zoom.
The EF-M lenses were set to f5.6 and the RF lens to f8.
I used Raw (Canon CRaw) capture and processed each file in Adobe Camera Raw to achieve what I determined to be optimum output for tonal range, lightness, freedom from aberrations and image detail.
I then reduced the size of the EOS-R image from 30Mpx to match that of the images from the 24 Mpx M50.
Then I viewed all the resulting images side by side at 100% on screen.
Results
There were minor differences in lighting due to clouds passing over the sky and minor differences in color rendition, lightness and effective focal length.
After adjusting for these differences and processing, I found it very difficult to tell which image had come from which camera/lens combination.
The images from the EOS-R were marginally better than those from the M50 with a little more color depth, slightly more local contrast and less need for work in ACR.
All the EF-M lenses delivered very nearly indistinguishable results at 22mm and f5.6.
Conclusion
The camera makers want you to buy full frame gear (with the 24x36mm sensor) as it generates more profit per unit.
But camera users have long favoured crop sensor gear because it does a very good job, is less expensive, smaller and lighter.
Here is the full size test image:
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| This is the full size frame of the test scene And now for crops of the test images. Can you tell which image came from which camera/lens combination ? Consider that one of them came from a camera/lens combination costing (in Australia) $850 and one of them from a camera/lens combination costing $4000.  |
