One of the advantages of a crop sensor camera is the long shot. The Siamang swinging from the trees was shot at an effective 600mm. I used my budget priced Sigma 120-400mm f/5.6 from more than 30 meters away. It was a brilliant sunny day so I shot in aperture preferred mode wide open at f/5.6. The camera metered 1/500th which was just fast enough. If I had tried to get this shot with a full frame camera I would have needed a lens that cost several times as much.
Don't get me wrong, I think owning a full frame camera is great. If the Full Frame Nex is priced at a level I can afford, I'll have to have one. I think it will be a brilliant move by Sony to have a Leica killer camera in the lineup. But it's not likely to be the killer gear for long shots of wild life. In spite of the amazing engineering in current day cameras, there is still no one size fits all. So guys like me who love street photography one day, and will be shooting wild life or songbirds the next day, just have to have multiple cameras. In the list of must have gear for nature shooters has to be a APS-C sized DSLR camera for the extra reach it gives you.
I love my A77, but I'm looking forward to the replacements. There has been a lot of talk about 30 megapixel sensors, which is something that doesn't matter at all to me. For the type of photography I enjoy, getting two stops better ISO performance would be the killer. The Siamang shot above was done at ISO 320, which on the A77 is where the awesome detail of the 24 megapixel raw files starts to break down. To compensate, I use Imagenomics Noiseware which is wonderful. If you invest the time to learn how to use their Photoshop plug-in it will get you an extra stop with no discernible loss of detail. But how cool would it be to have that extra stop right in the original raw file? In this case it would be like having a 400mm f/4 lens, something that is definitely outside my budget.
Another thing I'm looking for in Sony's new crop sensor DSLR is better video. The A99 was a leader is having 10-bit raw video available at the HDMI port. The Canon 5D Mk III did a firmware update to make that happen soon after. For those of you who are not total gear geeks, 10-bit raw video is like a tsunami of data. You would fill up a 16 gig memory card in a heartbeat. But there are relatively cheap external recorders that use small terabyte sized drives. Until very recently that kind of performance was only available on professional level cinema cameras. So I'm hoping that feature will be available on the full frame Nex and the crop sensor A77 replacement. No rumors about this yet.
Bottom line is that for several different reasons, a crop sensor camera is going to be part of my future for some time to come.
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