I’m not particularly bound to any particular camera crop factor. I’ve shot Olympus compact and FourThirds DSLRs for the last decade, until I finally succumbed to a full-frame Canon 5D back in June.

Cropped sensors

But I still love the 2x cropped sensor format, for various reasons – and for specific purposes. Don’t get me wrong, the Canon – even through 5 years old – is a wonderful beast. But it is a beast. It’s big and heavy (especially with the battery pack) and unwieldy. By comparison, my E-520 is a dream to carry around. It’s wonderful for macro work, particularly underwater. I can get most of my rig in hand luggage. And you can carry around all day.

So when we start to get the same quality of lens for the micro FourThirds cameras, I’ll probably move over (although mainly because the larger form won’t be supported in a budget range any more.)

A lot of wildlife photographers love their cropped format cameras. Your 300mm lens becomes a 480mm or 600mm “equivalent”. Although that equivalence only really relates to the angle of view, it does mean that your frame is filled (and your megapixels can be optimised) with a smaller, lighter cheaper lens.

Upselling

However, Canon and Nikon haven’t really considered these can be “real” cameras. They want “serious” photographers to aspire to the 35mm sized (almost) full-frame sensor format. They were holding this out as a Holy Grail for years. And the products are very good.

But this only really matters with the lenses. Canon’s ‘L’ series lenses are built for the EF (full frame) mount – and Nikon have a similar policy. The lenses will fit the smaller EF-S mount, but a lot of the image area is, effectively, wasted.

What’s missing for crop sensor Canon cameras is pro quality EF-S lenses. (I’m not going into the area of image stabilisation now – suffice to say Olympus and Sony build it into the camera bodies, and their lenses are cheaper as a result).

Thinking about it, there is, actually, another side that’s missing, and that’s a budget – say £900 – full-frame body with basic functionality. Not so many bells and whistles, as a second body to meet the occasional needs of cropped sensor enthusiasts. Don’t expect it in a hurry, though. That would be like eating your babies.

While Canon and Nikon had an 80% market share, they could sustain this market model by implicit consent.

Micro FourThirds

But then Olympus and Panasonic came up with the Micro FourThirds format – with electronic viewfinders. This meant no mirrors, so the lenses could be even smaller, lighter and (we hope) cheaper.

Sony (notably) rolled their NEX off the blocks fairly quickly, with 1.6x crop factor sensors that can use (with slight modifications) much of their existing lens range.

All of these have jumped to a significant share of the market – particularly in Japan – at a time when smartphones appear to be squeezing the dedicated compact market.

The Big Two respond … or not

So Canon and Nikon are left in a bit of a quandary.

The other players had little to lose from the mirrorless cameras. Initially written off as “not professional”, the market share speaks differently. So what can Canon and Nikon do ?

The big “L” series lenses, somewhat outsized on the crop DSLRs, would look ridiculous on a tiny mirrorless body. But if they produce pro quality lenses for crop size mirrorless bodies (at prices matching the competition) then they’ll be cannibalising their core DSLR model.

At the time of writing, Canon have to respond. They probably want to see what happens to Nikon.

But Nikon have come up with their “1” series cameras. With an even smaller crop factor than their competitors. Which, really, kinda validates the competition, and exposes the initial FUD defence strategy.

However, the big selling point for the DSLRs has always been mount compatibility, and that’s pretty much shot to hell.

So purchasers have no real reason (other than brand loyalty) to stick with Nikon for the mirrorless range. They might as well pick the best system, as they’re looking at a whole new range of lenses whichever way they jump. Why have Nikon released this range ? Probably as a spoiler.

Actually, they’ve been teasing the market for a while with “wait till you see what Nikon’s going to do” rumours. I think most commentators are underwhelmed by what we’ve seen so far.

The only thing Nikon really have going for them is the ability to take high quality stills while shooting video, but I suspect that USP won’t last for long.

Picking up on the “spoiler” aspect, camera shops don’t like to confuse customers – or their sales team – with unnecessary complications*. They’re also – understandably – reluctant to invest money in carrying stock which is likely to become obsolete within a year, so they’re only likely to stock two or three formats. One reason Olympus FourThirds sales dropped was that high street shops only stocked Canon, Nikon and Sony.
Nikon have to hope that they’ll get the shelf space, against formats that have a two year head start – the original micro FourThirds users will be getting around to their first camera upgrade, and Sony’s brand pretty much guarantees space.

It’s going to be interesting. Let’s just hope that the best systems win out, rather than those that are most adept at gaming the profit margins of the purchasing teams in the electronics multiples. But the cynic in me suspects that “bigger crop factor” may, however perversely, become a selling point (“It’s got more crop factors than the competition!“).

* There’s now only really one national high street camera chain in the UK. Most of the other sales are now through general electronics stores. So the sales teams are even more easily confuseable. Independents can’t compete with the volumes.