Missed oportunity.

What I really want from Pentax, (and I bet a lot of other people too) is a full frame sensor. I think Pentax are missing a great oportunity to overtake Nikon and Canon, here. If pentax produced a FF dslr for arround £500. can you imagine what market share they'd get., as well as the unending gratitude of those of us with lots of old PK lenses. a return to compact flash from the piddly little sd would be good too. I'll keep hoping!

Now that we have ultra-wide angles at reasonable prices I'm not so sure it matters any more.

The real advantage might be lower noise levels from a larger sensor with larger pixels but there would not necessarily be much increase in MP count.

And then a new range of lenses would be needed, so all in all I think it's pretty unlikely. Not impossible, but unlikely.

I have a K10D and have started investing in some dedicated glass! I would not want to put that investment behind me and buy a full frame DSLR! One thing that has always bee a strength for me of Pentax is the backward compatability of their glass. I would not want to compromise this selling point.

We have a comedian in our midst. Try £5,000.

G

Get a Z-1 and a Nikon scanner....

easy! and change from 500 squid...

Backwards compatibility, I like. Turning my 35mm into a 52, and my prized 85mm SMC Takumar into a 122, I dont like! I don't see why it would cost any more to make a big sensor than a small one.

Well it does, and it costs a lot more as well.

I understand that it is much more difficult to make consistent large sensors and the failure rate becomes very high thus making the process much more expensive.

Then the cameras also have to be bigger but also the lenses would need to be bigger and they would be very expensive also.

Going for a smaller format has enabled reasonable, even cheap, price levels to be achieved and remarkable advances in lenses to be made.

I think if that was the case the D40 and EOS450D would be full frame.

Personally, I think it's right that Pentax are moving the way they are...plus increasing the resolution places more demand on older lenses too. This is why Canikon recommend that only the high level lenses are used on the D3/EOS 1....

Pentax have few lenses compared with the BIG 2

Peter

And it costs more because of the physics...

An APS-C sensor has about 370 square mm of chip, versus a full frame at 864 square mm! That's about 2.3 times the surface area of semiconductor.

Semiconductors have to be grown, sliced, and then one wafer is divided up into several die. The wafer is the expensive part and the more chip dies you get from it the higher the yield and therefore the cheaper the end result. You also have to add to that the imperfection rate of the wafer - so some of the chip dies will be dead = wasted money.

Your FF price of £500 is hugely optimistic I would expect a FF body to be around the £2k mark, and MF body to be at least £5k. And it's largely down to the cost of the sensor plus the extra support electronics required.

As has been mentioned (many times), there really isn't a big problem with APS-C... except in the minds of some In practical use there is no issue whatsoever, and often some clear advantages (e.g. 300mm lens behaves like 450mm - ideal for wildlife and sports).

Matt

When the 35mm film format came out, was there the same chorus of complaints?

Or had interchangeable lenses not been introduced by then?

Totally impossible to take seriously those strange chaps with those toy Leicas. It'll never catch on.

Nothing less thatn a 10" x 8" glass plate for me.

Ok Gentlemen. As I'm no expert on the manufacturing process of sensors, I'll defer to your superior knowlage -- but I'm not gonna be happy til theres a Pentax FF dslr that looks like an LX or a Spotmatic!