Micro 4/3rds vs. Full Frame

I think we all (me included) sometimes tend to be overly technical over these kind of issues - and don't really focus on the practical everyday consequences.

For instance nobody is really interested in the sensor size if we show around an 8 by 10 print of a small insect - the audience is (hopefully!) awed by the detail it sees of a 12 mm long fly magnified to a 240 mm long beast on the print we have in hand. This "real world" magnification is what counts IMO, and it's at 20x in my example.

Now for us macro photographers trying to please the crowd we have to select the right tool to do so. And for all practical purposes we first don't muse about magnification ratios and sensor sizes, we just want that darn insect to fill the frame and get the most resolution and detail possible out of it for our later presentation.

Only if we fail in that quest we begin to wonder why we have only limited success in our endeavors. And then we are overwhelmed with the implications of sensor sizes, pixel pitches, AA filters, Bayer patterns, effective apertures, circles of confusion, diffraction limits, background noise, lens resolution etc. pp. These are complicated to calculate, because they interact and also always have to be related to the final goal - e.g. an 8 by 10 print viewed from a distance from 1 foot.

In my personal experience - I've shot macro with FF, APS-C, 4/3rds and 1/1.7" sensors - you can work with all kinds of setups and get nice results. And their practical differences boil down to these two major things for me:

• the bigger the sensor, the larger and more cumbersome the overall setup tends to become;
• the smaller the sensor, the smaller my creative choices and PP wiggling room becomes (e.g. usable aperture range, dynamic range in RAW files, usable ISO range).

To sum it up: IMO there is no "best" sensor size or whatever for macro, but there are always some limits with the actual setup you use. Know them to get the best results possible with it. And go out and take pictures!

Phil