
The Remarkable Persistence of 24x36 - daxelrod
http://theonlinephotographer.typepad.com/the_online_photographer/2018/10/the-remarkable-persistence-of-24x36.html
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nicoburns
I just wanted to add, for anyone who is not familiar with the site, that The
Online Photographer is pne of the Good Corners Of The Internet. It features
well thought out articles, a moderated comment section, and a real sense of
commu ity. Highly reccomended if you're interested in photography.

Oh, and I should add: an ethical ad based revenue model. Ads are self hosted,
js free, and only for companies that the author believes his audience may be
interested in.

~~~
nabla9
I use adblocker and I didn't even notice the ads.

Small amount of small static ad images on the side is perfectly OK for me, but
they probably don't generate as much income as those that interrupt you.

~~~
mygo
> Small amount of small static ad images on the side is perfectly OK for me,
> but they probably don't generate as much income as those that interrupt you.

Well static ads don’t have to be pay per click / or per view, so it’s likely
they set their own placement price and make their money up front. Under that
scenario they would be making money as long as the ad space is occupied.

~~~
nabla9
It's ads generate less revenue to the advertiser, they pay less for the ads no
matter what the payment method is.

~~~
mygo
that’s only one side of it. the site operator also has to decide if placing
the ads are worth the cost of having ads on his pages. So if the operator is
selling static ad placement and getting buyers, then he’s at least covering
that cost plus profit, otherwise it’s not worth it.

So it’s like buying a billboard. The advertisers have to decide if it’s worth
their money or not. But the operator will be making money as long as the ad
space is occupied.

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GlenTheMachine
Enthusiastic (and, in solidarity with another popular post right now,
mediocre) amateur photographer here.

When I was a teenager I desperately wanted a 35 mm SLR. I bought photography
magazines, read all the reviews. For me, price was the biggest factor, so I
was looking at Pentax K1000-class cameras, which could be had then for a
little over $100 with a lens.

The thing that struck me then, and still strikes me today, is the sheer amount
of brand snobbishness in photography. Back then, you weren't a “real”
photographer”, and you weren't using a “real” camera, unless you were shooting
Nikon, Canon, or Leica. And of those, only the Canons were at all affordable.
And yet, you could throw the exact same Ektachrome in any 35 mm camera, grab a
good prime lens, and shoot exactly the same pictures. No one on earth could
tell whether you had taken it with a Leica or a Pentax.

And the same thing is true today. Today, because most of my photography (which
is, again, mediocre) is travel photography, I shoot an Olympus em-10 with a
$300 lens most of the time. It's small and it won't break my heart if it gets
broken or stolen. The m43 system has a ton of great lenses and high quality
camera bodies. With the different sensors it's now possible, in theory, to
even tell the difference between pictures shot on an Olympus and a FF Nikon,
but in practice 99% of photographers won't ever realize those differences. But
it isn't a Nikon or a Leica, so I'm still not using a “real” camera.

Anyway, my point is this: to be perfectly honest, I doubt the ability of the
field to choose standards based in technical merit. There are decent reasons
to desire FF cameras over APS or m43 — the availability of a lot of legacy
lens designs, for instance — but as far as I can tell that isn't the real
reason it's taking off. It's taking off because it's now possible to drop ten
grand on such a system.

Sorry for the cynicism. But I've been told so often that I'm not using a real
camera that I finally just decided to ignore the hype and enjoy taking
pictures.

~~~
frostburg
The Leica lenses were better than the Nikon lenses that were better than the
Canon lenses that were better than the Pentax lenses, on average (there are
exceptions to this). It didn't really matter at normal print sizes for usual
focal length, but for example a 21/3.4 Schneider Super-Angulon for Leica from
1963 was a vastly better ultrawide than what you could have for other 35mm
systems.

If you try to print big (let's say A3+) you'll rapidly find the limits of the
m43 system.

~~~
jamesg
> If you try to print big (let's say A3+) you'll rapidly find the limits of
> the m43 system

I’ve printed a good number of images shot on m43 at about that size, and
that’s not been my experience. The specifics definitely matter, but I’ve found
Olympus’s M.Zuiko 75/1.8 to be competitive with a 70-200/2.8 in terms of
sharpness, distortion, etc, for instance (dxomark seem to broadly agree:
[https://www.dxomark.com/Lenses/Olympus/Olympus-MZUIKO-
DIGITA...](https://www.dxomark.com/Lenses/Olympus/Olympus-MZUIKO-DIGITAL-
ED-75mm-F18) vs [https://www.dxomark.com/Lenses/Nikon/AF-S-VR-Zoom-
Nikkor-70-...](https://www.dxomark.com/Lenses/Nikon/AF-S-VR-Zoom-
Nikkor-70-200mm-f-2.8G-IF-ED)). You do have a larger minimum DoF, but 150/3.6
equivalent is not that far off.

I would like a bit more resolution, but that’s also true of my Nikon D4S (also
16MP).

Clearly FF and m43 have different strengths, and you’ll get the best results
by playing to the strengths of each. I concede that all else being equal,
larger sensors do afford you more flexibility (lower light performance, for
instance). On the other hand, traveling with my Nikon FF kit is a huge PITA
(mostly due to the lenses; the body is a constant cost I can mostly deal
with).

I’d love to hear more about the limitations you’ve hit with larger prints on
m43.

~~~
frostburg
I don't actually use m43, but 16 or even 24mp would be rather inadequate for
my needs, especially from a bayer sensor.

I do my printing at 720 ppi on Pictorico OHP transparency stock, which I then
use to contact print cyanotypes or pt/pd (I'm really dedicated to useless
stuff). You can see how the resolution requirements for anything bigger than a
postcard are stringent.

In practice I use either a Sony A7r (36mp, with very sharp primes) a Sigma
with a foveon sensor (which holds up very well to the Sony at ISO 100, and
it's not like I use the Sony at more than ISO 100) or high-resolution scans
from Adox CMS20 II microfilm stock (ISO 20, there is a special low contrast
developer for pictorial contrast) shoot on a Leica or Contax with their
respective very highly resolving primes.

~~~
jamesg
Gotcha. Cool setup!

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mauvehaus
> Cameras that used 24x36mm sensors returned photographers' favorite lenses to
> the FOVs they were already long comfortable with. And, of course, the second
> was prestige. Status is a very strong motivator in the photography hobby.
> "Full-frame" sensor cameras were bigger and more expensive, their "image
> quality" at least detectably ahead of that of smaller sensors.

Some of us have also been patiently waiting for "full frame" DSLR bodies are
doing it because a fast normal lens (so-called because it has (much
handwaving) roughly the same field of view as your eyes) is so cheap as to be
basically free compared to a nice DSLR body. A similarly fast and sharp 28mm
or 35mm (roughly a normal lens on an APS-C-sized sensor) is vastly more
expensive, if it's available at all.

Pentax[0], to my (limited) knowledge never made a 35mm or 28mm lens that came
close to matching the speed and sharpness of the SMC Pentax-M 50mm f/1.7,
which can be had <$50 US on ebay. The first 28mm f/2 I see listed is $430, the
much commoner f/2.8 and f/3.5 are much cheaper, but give up a lot in low light
performance.

The 50mm f/1.7 is a mighty fine lens; the arguably better 50mm f/1.4 goes for
<$100. It's not until you're looking at the rare, super fast, and arguably yet
better still (I have no personal experience) 50mm f/1.2 that you hit the price
range of the 28mm f/2.

So whether you're buying at the peanuts end of the price range or the high
end, you're giving up a stop and a half of low light performance going with
APS-C over 24x36.

It could be argued that with ever improving digital sensors, low light
performance in a lens is less important now than ever. There's probably merit
to that.

Still, as mentioned in TFA the faster lenses let you make different choices
with regards to depth of field than you have with a slower lens. I'd rather
have that choice, historical preferences of f/64 notwithstanding.

[0] I'm not going into lens generations here. As an extremely casual user, I
buy what's good, used, and cheap. I'm strictly an M42 and SMC-M guy, and can't
compare with anything newer; my overall impression from reading reviews is
that the SMC-K, -M, and -A generations are largely comparable for the same
focal length and aperture. The M42 generations are adequately comparable, at
least for folks like me.

~~~
Sharlin
On the other hand, to my knowledge very few if any small-and-cheap double-
Gauss "nifty fifties" are particularly great wide open on modern high-
resolution sensors. Though it could be argued that the current drive for
ultra-sharpness among the "Ad-Am" crowd again stems more from prestige—and the
tendency to pixel-peep—rather than any real need. Especially in a world where
the vast majority of photos are viewed at low resolutions, highly compressed,
and on small screens.

Mirrorless, with its short backfocus distance compared to SLRs, does bring
onto table the feasibility of inexpensive and compact "normal" lenses for
APS-C and smaller sensors. The Panasonic 25mm f/1.8 for MFT is a good example,
as is the recently announced Canon EF-M 32mm f/1.4.

~~~
mauvehaus
Most of the reviews of the Pentax fifties contain words to the effect that
they aren't super sharp around the edges of the frame wide open, but that they
sharpen up by f/2\. I don't have any background in optics, but I've operated
under the assumption that most lenses at full aperture necessarily compromise
some resolution for speed, meaning you have the same loss of resolution with a
28mm or 35mm lens at full aperture. Are other focal lengths of different
designs where this doesn't hold true?

Do modern sensors have enough more resolution than film that they show the
loss of sharpness in the lens at smaller apertures? I'm curious because I'll
be looking for a (used) DSLR body at some point in the next few years. At
least in the Pentax world, most of the commentary about old lenses on new
bodies centers around the lack of the mechanical aperture coupling on the
newer bodies, and the compromises stemming from that (stop-down metering,
mostly).

~~~
rangibaby
> Do modern sensors have enough more resolution than film that they show the
> loss of sharpness in the lens at smaller apertures?

Film quite obviously shows soft corners too, just most people didn't care
because they weren't obvious at the sizes normal people view or printed
photos.

I wouldn't worry about soft corners to be honest. It's like criticizing a
classic muscle car because it has a slower 0-100 than newer ones

~~~
jasomill
I agree. And if your underlying question is "are these lenses going to take
good pictures with this camera", the best advice I can give is: _try it!_

I say this because some of my favorite lens/camera combinations are those with
issues far beyond mere unsharpness, and that would likely be rejected by the
mass of Internet forum cognoscenti in favor of native lenses that I know from
experience that I'd never use even if I already owned them.

Case in point: an old Arri/Zeiss 16mm f/1.2 cine lens that I shoot on Micro
Four Thirds, despite the fact that it was designed for the much smaller 16mm
(motion picture) format: in spite of edges are soft at all apertures, corners
that aren't so much "soft" as "missing altogether", an overall image almost
certainly less _sharp_ than the average native kit zoom, and various other
technical considerations compromising optical performance, I enjoy both the
process of shooting with the lens and the results when I do. So why, then,
should I give a damn what the Internet thinks?

Whereas, I sold the more "appropriate" Panasonic 15mm f/1.7 native lens
several years ago, at a considerable loss, for lack of use.

------
mortenjorck
I adore these obscure histories of standards we take for granted. I could see
this piece being adapted into something like an episode of 99 Percent
Invisible.

------
alxv
The 35mm format is rather amazing balance of design trade-offs. No wonder it
is so enduring.

It's large enough for the double-Gauss lens (a.k.a. normal prime lens) to have
a nice shallow deep of field wide open. f/1.2 is close to the limit of a
typical SLR mount. So a normal 50mm f/1.2 lens gets us 42mm of aperture. This
means we can get the same depth of field and angle of view as a 6x7 medium
format with a 110mm f/2.8 lens or a 4x5 large format with a 180mm f/4.5 (but
with a much smaller system!) And we get a faster lens as a bonus.

Smaller formats lose some of that versatility of composition. The focal length
of the normal lens on APS-C is 32mm. We would need f/0.8 lens to the same DOF.
That's not possible on an SLR mount. Mirrorless systems with their shorter
flange distances could get us there. But even then there are limits to how
short the flange can be because image sensors become much less efficient as
the angle of incidence of the light hitting them increases.

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combatentropy
> It used 35mm movie film

And why was movie film 35mm wide? It seems an odd width. William Dickson was
going for a frame 1 inch wide, then added 3/8" for the sprocket holes. The
original specification was in Imperial units: 1 3/8" (34.925mm). I don't know
when or why its name turned to metric.

"At the end of the year 1889, I increased the width of the picture from 1/2
inch to 3/4 inch, then to 1 inch by 3/4 inch high. The actual width of the
film was 1 3/8 inches to allow for the perforations now punched on both edges
[...]." \---
[https://archive.org/stream/journalofsociety21socirich#page/4...](https://archive.org/stream/journalofsociety21socirich#page/450/mode/2up)

To go back further, we would have to ask, why is an inch an inch?

------
teraflop
> The 24x36mm image size, which by the 1950s was becoming accepted as a
> standard, was also widely known as a rather awkward rectangle. It suited
> landscape photos, but little else—it looked too tall in verticals, and made
> composition difficult, especially for photographers used to the square shape
> common in 120 cameras.

I don't quite understand this part. If 35mm film was "standard" but
photographers had a strong preference for square images, why wasn't there a
proliferation of cameras that could shoot 24x24mm images on the same type of
film?

~~~
gchpaco
Too small, slide mounts were already standardized on 24x36, and the square was
never all that popular among the general photographer. The reason why the
square shape in 120 was originally developed was a technical hack. Since it
outputs a square, there was never any need to hold a Hasselblad vertically;
just take the photo and crop it to suit. The only square consumer oriented
cameras I can think of are twin-lens reflex cameras like the Rolleiflex, which
are delightful but somewhat uncommon. A number of folks started trying to make
use of the square format as a square format, but it was not originally, I
think, intended for that purpose.

Re: too small; an 8x10, one of the smaller standard print formats for
portraits, is about an 8x enlargement from a 35mm frame. With modern materials
and good technique, 8x-11x is feasible, but starting to push it at the edges;
I have printed 13x17s off 35mm but I would not want to push it much larger.
35mm does 4x6s, 5x7s and 8x10s perfectly reasonably, which is what it spent
most of its time doing for common consumer work. It's worth noting that one of
the other common consumer cameras of the 1940s was the Brownie, which output
6cmx9cm images and was routinely contact printed, producing something smaller
even than a 4x6.

120 produces images that are between 1.8x (in the 645 format) or 2.5x (in most
others) as large, physically, meaning that the common enlargements are only
4x-5x. If you push it, with quality equipment, you start getting into print
sizes that are super clumsy to handle like 20x24. I've never printed,
personally, anything larger than a 16x20. If you do your own wet processing
they're also nicer to work with—35mm negatives are real small and kinda
fiddly. 4x5 sheets are also delightful to work with, of course, but they
require fighting the camera in the field.

~~~
rplst8
> With modern materials and good technique, 8x-11x is feasible, but starting
> to push it at the edges; I have printed 13x17s off 35mm but I would not want
> to push it much larger.

Many pros push 35mm to billboard sizes. The size of the print doesn't matter.
It's the viewing distance.

~~~
HankB99
Not a pro here, but the greater the distance, the better my pictures look. ;)
Back to the subject at hand, it is a little surprising to me that a format
closer to square didn't catch on at some point. I suppose that the image
quality of the image deteriorates more toward the edge of a circle around the
center point. The format that gets the most out of a circle of acceptable
quality is a square. As the shape becomes more oblong, more of that
'acceptable quality area' falls outside the image. Perhaps this is one reason
that larger formats are closer to square than 35mm.

~~~
sjwright
Well to be pedantic, the format that gets the most out of a circle of
acceptable quality is a _circle,_ not a square.

~~~
HankB99
Point taken. That makes me curious if any cameras were ever produced in that
format. I would suspect that circular format photography might be used in
astronomy where every last bit of the image is valuable.

~~~
sjwright
Yo’re right though, a square is certainly the rectangle of largest area from a
circular lens.

If there was a need to maximize the capture for technical reasons I imagine it
would be easier to just oversize the film or sensor and trim the corners.

------
abruzzi
While tha 36x24 frame dates to the original Leica, I believe the 3:2 aspect
predates that significantly as the some of the early Kodak box cameras shot
6x9cm on 120 film.

