Last week I was going through my RSS feeds when I came across this article on DIY Photography where the author was ranting about losing business because a client wanted the job shot with a full frame camera and not a “crop” camera. While I have my own thoughts on that issue, it reminded me of an article I started writing a couple of years back on crop factors and formats.

It’s long been a thing in digital photography to talk about crop sensor cameras. APS-C, DX, micro-4/3rds, you know the ones. Personally, I’ve about had it with that; it needs to stop. There was a time where there was some truth to some of those formats being crops, but that time is largely gone. As far as I’m concerned, none of the so-called crop formats are really crops of anything anymore, but rather are formats on their own that should be treated that way. They may have been in the past, 10 or more years ago, but they aren’t any longer.

For me the line in the sand is simple. I consider a format is a crop when it’s expected to exist in a system without anything being designed to accommodate it specifically. Likewise, it becomes a format on it’s own when its eccentricities are catered to specifically (whether by design or evolution), and definitely, when it develops conventions that are broadly conformed to across manufacturers. It’s not that something shares a lens mount that makes it crop or not; it’s whether lenses are designed specifically for that size frame, which draws the distinction in my mind.

APS-C has most certainly crossed that line. It made the jump ages ago, but nobody was apparently paying attention. It made the jump, the moment the camera makers started making lenses specifically for that frame size instead of leaving photographers stuck with using full frame lenses that never really covered the right angles of view or simply left them lacking coverage.

Furthering the idea that APS-C has emerged as a format in its own right is emergence of a convention for focal ranges that broadly hold even between varying manufacturers. Where 135-format zooms had their conventions; variable-aperture, 28-to-something mm zooms for the consumers, fixed-aperture, 24-to-something mm zooms for the pros. The APS-C cameras have their variable-aperture 18-to-50-something mm zooms for consumers, and fixed aperture 16 or 17-to-50-something mm zooms for “pros”. It doesn’t really matter who the manufacturer is, or what the platform is lines are drawn the same.

When I noted above the idea of being catered to specifically, whether by evolution or design, APS-C certainly hits both marks there as well. The evolution happened on pretty much all of the SLR based systems when each respective manufacturer released their designed for crop sensor lenses. The designed form the ground up side in all of the mirrorless systems (Samsung NX, Sony NEX, Canon EOS-M) that are designed from the ground up around the APS-C sensor.

In fact, in the land of small format SLRs, I’d argue that there have been few if perhaps only one true crop sensor design and that was Canon’s APS-H format in the EOS-1Des. Canon never treated it as a first class format—the APS-H 1Des were always the bastard child of the lineup, even if they were $4000 pro bodies. APS-H 1Des had full frame mirror boxes and EF mounts, so they couldn’t mount crop specific lenses, and even if they could, the lenses weren’t designed to cover the frame with appropriate quality. Even then, the focal lengths would still be something of a compromise—though admittedly it would have been a nice one if you’re into wide angle.

In the end though, I don’t know if popular perception treating these formats in their own right and not crops of some other format would make much of a difference of if there even were one to make. I would like to believe it would, and that maybe we’d see the demand for and some reinvested effort into high-end bodies like the 7D and D300s.

PS. If my posts for the last couple of weeks have seemed a bit ramblely and thin, like this one, I’ve been in the midst of a minor but annoying construction project that’s displaced my work space and routine repeatedly over the course of the last couple of weeks. Some of the slack was taken up by material I rushed a bit to get queued up to post, some has been the mindless ramblings of someone who’s not really had a good working environment for a while. Hopefully this will, at least for a while, be the last of the thin on content ramblings and I can get back to stuff that has some real meat to it.