Wide on 4:3 camera's

Am I wrong to say that with the 4:3 system, wide angle shots are less wide at 14 on a E510 than at 18 with a Pentax K10d for example?

I am doubting heavy between these 2 now looking at features, the Oly winning on size, and the K10 winning on controls. Pic quality should be about the same, so that is no factor for me. I currently know too little about the 4:3 system and it advantages and disadvantages.

On a 4/3 camera a 14mm lens is equivalent to the field of view on a 28 mm lens on 35mm size sensor.

I believe an 18mm lens on a Pentax is equivalent the field of view using 27mm on 35mm frame size, so the difference would be 1mm.
--
Larry

currently using:
E-500
Backing up with E-1, and E-300
and a Canon Rebel 350 D

No Text

When you do the math with 35mm "crop factors", the two would appear to give you almost identical images, no? (except for different aspect ratio). These days I'm not sure how accurate marked focal lengths on lenses are (in the old days, they could be off by up to 10%), so I suspect to really answer your question definitively, you'd need to shoot pics on both cameras with the exact lenses in question. But for all practical purposes, I'd have to guess they are very close and this question (wide coverage with kit lenses) should not drive your final decision.

Have you handled both cameras? I believe they are substantially different in size and feel, aren't they? The Pentax K100D would be more the size of the Olympus I think.

When you consider Pentax vs Olympus systems, both have reasonably nice kit lenses (2 lenses covering 28 to 300mm 35mm-equivalent focal lengths). Beyond that I believe Olympus has a more compelling set of zoom options (though more third party glass may be available for the Pentax), but Pentax has more primes if that's your thing. Both can use legacy (older manual focus) lenses, though the Pentax may provide focus assist for Pentax mount; I'm not sure about this; worth checking.

On balance, I chose Olympus largely because of the lens offerings. But the rest of the system is solid too.

I have a magnificent pano of the prismatic geiser fields using my 11-22 and the E-330. It is 8 images pano'd together using PTGui. It is a 2928 x 8640 pixel image. You won't get that from any Dslr regardless of format.
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DaveJC

The only other thing is the viewfinder that worries me. It appears extremely small and I do wear glasser and hear bad thing about the maginifier.

As for pic quality, I have no doubt both will produce fantastic pictures. When it comes to the K100 or the 510 it would be 510 no contest IMO. But with the K10 I jusT have trouble making the decision. Autofoucus I am not sure if the 11-point matters a whole lot. In the öld" days I only had 1 or 3 points on a analoque camera as well.

It is over 900 euro's which for me is a lot of money I can only spend once

But you DID get it from your DSLR, surely?

--
mumbo jumbo

I'm an eyeglass wearer. Olympus, like many other manufacturers, has added a very nice feature called the dioptre adjustment which allows me to adjust the dioptre in the viewfinder to match, or nearly match, my perscription. Using this feature allows me to remove my glasses when shooting.

In the occasions that I don't remove my glasses, I've found the VFs on both the E-1s and the E-330 to be more than acceptable. I believe that the viewfinder "issue" is much ado about nothing.
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Troll Whisperer
Bill Turner

If you wear glasses, make sure you have the opportunity to look through the e-510 before buying. If this is not possible, I'd recommend the K10D even though I'm obviously an Olympus fan - brand doesn't matter if you can't see through the camera, and everything unfortunately points to the K10D being much better here.

I hope Olympus manage to compensate for the small mirror better in the future (including after the E-3)...
--
http://flickr.com/photos/iskender

I suffer from myopia or nearsightedness. The first thing I did when I got my 510 was adjust the diopter to accommodate my vision so I could look through the viewfinder without my glasses. However, this week I set it so I could use the camera wearing my glasses. I got tired of taking my glasses off and on each time I wanted to look through the viewfinder. It hampered my ability to just look around to see what the camera was seeing. I also could not see well enough to judge whether a subject was interesting enough to photograph...a person across the street is just a blur...when I tried keeping my glasses in my pocket while walking about with the camera.

I have not decided what to do yet. The glasses let light in and I do not have an eyecup for the 510.

Steve

--
http://www.flickr.com/photos/knoblock/ Equipment in plan.

Film will only become art when its materials are as inexpensive as pencil and paper. -- Jean Cocteau

Here http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/read.asp?forum=1022&message=24403799 you can see that a 7mm on the oly is just wider than a 10mm on Pentax

Goffen

OK, OK, you sure won't get that from any SINGLE Dslr image.

Now I need a larger format printer to handle the latest batch. I did the Grand Canon of Yellow Stone in a 4 x 6 matrix. Huge image which is beyond my Epson 2200 to show all the detail. It is a wonderful problem.

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DaveJC

Hi.

Ignoring the all important lens labelling problem that others have mentioned and assuming that indeed a 14mm labeled lens is indeed a true 14mm on 4/3 and an 18 mm labeled lens for Pentax is labelked correctly one should also consider the eventual print size.

This is extremely important expecially with wide angle lenses (or for that matter to wedding photogrraphers). For example, let us say one were using 35mm film and it was desired to produce an 8x10" print. In that case only 24 x 30mm of the total 24x36mm negative can be used. Any wedding photographer using the typical advice of "filling the frame" and actually using the entire 36mm to film a bride from head to toe will be unable to print that bride on an 8x10 sheet of paper and require an 8x12 sheet.

therefore if one is printing to 8x10 or say 16x20 will be limited by the horizontal aspect of the sensor frame, a lens use on a 4/3 format camera is effectively wider than the 2x " FOV conversion factor" would hjave one beleive. Why?

let us say for simplicity that the effective sensor size is 13.5x18mm. if we now wish to print that "negative" into an 8x10 (or really 4x5 aspect ratio) the limiting dimension is not the 18 side but the 13.5 siide, so that we can use 13.5x16.875 mm of the sensor. We now have an effective FOV conversion factor of NOT 2 (36/18) but 1,78 (24/13.5). so our 14mm lens is NOT a 28 mm lens but in reality would require a 24.9mm lens on a 35mm film camera to duplicate the image.

If however it was desired to print an image with an aspect ratio closer to 3:2 such as 13x19 the 18mm side would be limiting and then indeed the conversion factor would be 2x as we could use only 12 x 18 mm of the total 13.5 x 18mm sensor.

This is the difficulty in comparing across differeing aspect ratios and in fact one of the reasons why 645 format (also a 4:3 aspect ratio is popular among pros shooting MF. I particularly like the 4/3 system with the wide lenses as it does produce a very wide appearing image reminiscent of my use of my old Rolleis with 645 backs.

hope this helps.

Ed Rauschkolb

bassetNL said:

Am I wrong to say that with the 4:3 system, wide angle shots are less
wide at 14 on a E510 than at 18 with a Pentax K10d for example?

Click to expand...

I think so.

Within the accuracy of the focal length printed on the lens, they are about
the same in the horozontal axis, but the 4/3's has a greater angle of view
in the vertical. [Ed covered the same ground while I was eating, but I think
the axis are imporant if you can crop to any format]

When I use wide angle, there is usually something in the vertical axis, a
building, canyon, or mountain. It is frequently the shortest axis that runs
out of angle of view first.



Even with shots like the photo of the Doges Palace below that look like
they are limited by the horizontal aren't.



To avoid perspective effects, the camera has to be app. level, leaving lots
of foreground that needs to be tossed. The original was.



So, depending on what dimension you are interested in, they
are about the same, or (where it counts) the 4/3's is wider (taller).

In the vertical axis:

4/3 -> 35mm 1.77x
7mm -> 12.4mm
11mm -> 19.5mm

--
Jeff Taylor
http://www.pbase.com/jltaylor

Try this: http://www.elcocolor.com/poster_special.htm

30"x60" is only $30.00, but you may have to shoot more images to fill in the detail :O)

bassetNL said:

Am I wrong to say that with the 4:3 system, wide angle shots are less
wide at 14 on a E510 than at 18 with a Pentax K10d for example?

I am doubting heavy between these 2 now looking at features, the Oly
winning on size, and the K10 winning on controls. Pic quality should
be about the same, so that is no factor for me. I currently know too
little about the 4:3 system and it advantages and disadvantages.

Click to expand...

Angle of view is dependent on two variables; sensor diagonal and the focal length of your lens. As in this equation;

ß = 2 arctan ( D / ( 2 * f) )

---------------------
Brennweite: f, - focal length
Sensordiagonale: D, - sensor diagonal
Bildwinkel: ß, - angle of view
---------------------

Or you can rework it for the focal length (instead of an angle), as;

f=0,5 x D / tan (ß 2)

..or any other variable you want. It is pretty much explained here;

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angle_of_view

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• Sergey

Hi,

I was glad to see this post, It is exactly the point I was trying to make in my more theoretical above post and is absolutely critical when one prints to classical sizes such as 8x10.

It is also very relevant when one comapares "image size" Consider the 10MP sensor of the coming Canon 40D to the 510 or (maybe) E-3,. Printing an 8x10 from the 10Mp 4/3 sensor has an informational advantage over the Canon 10MP sensor and is roughly comparable to printing the same image from the 12 MP sensor of the new Nikon 300 (in pixel count).

Obviously there will be little practical optical factor difference (DOF, etc) in comparing APS sized sensors in ranges between 1.5 and 1.8 when printing in the horizontal plane to 4:5 aspect ratio paper creates an FOV conversion factor of 1.78.

Ed Rauschkolb

Your explanation will, obviously, be as clear as mud to a new user.
Excellent post.
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Troll Whisperer
Bill Turner

Hi,

The angle of view, is virtually a uselfess oversimplification to even an experienced photographer never mind to a beginner as it says nothing about aspect ratio.

Consider MF which encompasses 6x6, 645, 67, 6x8, 6x13 and even Hassy's 35mm x 100 or so. . .

and how does angle of view help a beginning wedding photographer learn that he better etch 30mm marks on his viewscreen to avoid cutting off the brides head or toes for those final 16x20 portraits. . .

all 35 mm lenses will have the same angle of view but their coverage will be entirely different on an E1, K10, 30D, 1D, 1Ds, Hassy with 16M back, Hassy with 39M back, etc. . .

Ed Rauschkolb

Yep, you shouldn't expect a beginning photographer to be able to click on Start~Programs~Accessories~Calculator :O)