There's nothing but air between the flange and the sensor (well, there's a shutter and some flat glass) and the throat diameter's big enough that it's not in the way of anything so why have it any further than necessary?
Thank you!
Not really a lot of info there. It looks like Nikon settled on 16mm because it fit the camera body. Also, I think that Nikon gave the Z mount a 55mm diameter because Canon has a 54mm diameter.
The official line, as stated in the Nikon optical engineer's video, is that that was as short as they could make it and still have room for the sensor stack and the shutter.
I don't understand why you think that's important.
and any planned lens designs they already have on the table. Or perhaps enough extra buffer space for any possible design they may have for the future. And how would you ever really know what your optical engineers may design in the future and how far past the flange the design would need?
There is no question that allowing lenses to have optical and mechanical elements behind the flange is useful. It would be impossible to design practical lenses without at least mechanical elements behind the flange.
The last sentence is my point exactly. However, I believe that Nikon does have a spec for how far the lens can extend behind the flange, which lens designers must adhere to. I just don't know what that distance is.
Could it be that sensor pdaf Pixel have limited microlens opening to look in steep angles to the back element of the lens, thus the space needed because of design pdaf Pixel spread over nearly the whole sensor area?
Since Nikon does not encourage third party lenses there may be no published specification but I'm sure the Nikon lens designers know what constraints they are working with.
I had this thought as well. I still have a Nikon V2 and use the FT-1 adapter, but i can only use the center AF point with it. Some have theorized that the long distance from the lens to the sensor creates too narrow of an angle for AF receptors outside the center point to work properly. With this in mind, I believe the real reason Nikon chose 16mm FFD was to accommodate adapted AFS lenses for the best possible AF performance with the on sensor PDAF. of course this narrative is not as attractive as the one presented in the video. I had expected there to be a mention of adapted lens performance in the video and I find the omission a little suspicious.
A shorter flange distance frees constraints for the optical design of lenses. It potentially allows for smaller or higher quality wide angle lenses.
So does that mean that the other mirrorless cameras with longer FFDs are bad designs?Surely they could have made the FFD shorter on smaller sensor cameras as well.
We don't know how far they allow the lens to extend behind the sensor. So we don't have sufficient information.
