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Comment by kart23 | Hacker News Reader

it’s never made sense to me that there’s still not a single compact full frame camera. there are plenty of 35mm film cameras that you can literally slip in a pocket and still have pretty good lenses, what’s stopping a compact full frame camera these days?

https://casualphotophile.com/2019/05/17/ricoh-gr1v-film-came...

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One issue is that you need a bunch of space behind the focal plane in a digital camera (the thickness of the sensor + its mounting system + PCB + cooling gap) while film cameras can mount the film (~zero thickness) right against the back door of the body. Another is that people expect EVF now, which requires more envelope volume than a compact 35mm OVF. Generally people paying $$ for a camera expect it to have removable lenses which adds again to the physical envelope.

There have been some Sony camera with fixed 35mm focal length lens and FF sensor. Like this: https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1316682-REG/sony_cybe...

Theres lots of super thin digital cameras, an inch thin or less (coolpix, cybershot, etc). An iphone, which has a better screen, more capability and cpu power than a camera is extremely thin, what 'cooling gap'? Are you saying that the thickness of the sensor goes up as sensor size increases?

And theres plenty of $$ cameras with no removable lens, fuji x100 series, Sony RX1, leica Q, etc, like you linked.

I've got the smallest digital full frame (the Sony RX1). Compared with your linked analog Ricoh GR1v, the Sony is bigger because of its much more capable lens. Putting the Ricoh lens on the Sony would have limited the quality a lot. It's a question of "do the elements fit together?".

The sony lens is so big because its a lot faster. Sony also makes a pretty compact 35mm F2.8 lens comparable to what you could fit on a point and shoot. The elements definitely do 'fit together'.

https://electronics.sony.com/imaging/lenses/full-frame-e-mou...

There are pocketable FF camera with prime lenses and pocketable 1” sensor cameras with zooms. Those old 35mm film pocketable zooms had terrible apertures but a RX100M3 with a 1.8-2.8 aperture has a comparable effective aperture to some FF mirrorless with kit lens.

Compared to what modern 35mm cameras can deliver, these cameras had very bad resolution. Yes, you could build such a camera today with a 35mm sensor, but the results wouldn't really justify the effort. If you want good compact cameras, get one of the smaller mFT cameras like the E-M10 or OM-5 and mount a pancake lens on it.

“bad resolution”??? 35mm film can deliver 87 MP, more than any ff digital camera i know.

https://www.kenrockwell.com/tech/film-resolution.htm#:~:text....

No, it can't. That's at a very low contrast rate, meaning that any detail at the 87MP level is going to be extremely muted and barely noticeable even if it was already high contrast. So basically you'd only ever get that resolution if you were taking picture of a black/white striped test chart, nothing else.

A better benchmark is MTF50, at which you can get about 50 line pairs at ISO 100-50 which corresponds to about 10 megapixels. If we want to be nice we might go as low as MTF20 where you'll get about 18 megapixels of low contrast. I'm looking at Velvia 50, the same film as Ken (https://www.ishootfujifilm.com/uploads/VELVIA%2050%20Data%20...)

Ken also makes the point that the Bayer sensor reduces the resolution - and it does - but he forgets that film has different MTFs for different wavelengths, sometimes even as bad as half for red compared to green.

Tmax and Delta 100 have 150 lines per millimeter, and it's even way higher for certain specialty films like Adox CMS 20 with 250 lines. Though you probably need a drum scanner to resolve to that level. For general use, a high quality scanner at 22 mp is about enough. Thats with 35mm though. You get much much higher resolution with 120 film and larger

https://jpbuffington.com/?p=167

I was comparing color films, but sure, speciality black and white films can approach the resolution of current high resolution color cameras, with the drawback that the lack of stabilization will make these resolutions only achievable with a tripod and of course only for static subjects, in which case pixel shift is probably a better option.

And yes, you can use medium or large format film, but that comes with very serious drawbacks, and for low ISO film is literally impossible without a tripod, in which case you might be better served with sensor shift instead.

Ken Rockwell is the most reliable source of non-fiction fiction on the internet.

Besides that this number is high and there we are talking about only very high resolution films, the lenses limit the resolution. With the tiny lenses of those cameras, you wouldn't make good use of any large sensor. There is a reason that even mFT lenses are usually larger than those old compacts. They used 35mm film only because it was the widest available and cheapest material.

There are a few Leicas (Q3), a Sony (RX) and some others.

On APS-C (Fuji) or compact-design-but-with-changable-lens there are a lot more options.

There's the sigma fp which is the smallest I believe.

Sony a7C. Very compact...

It's still a bit of a thick back; compared to the thinner rangefinder film bodies it's a little thicker still.

What I don't like most about all my Sony cameras is the hand grip. It feels made for a robot, and I miss the nice organic shape of Canon and Nikon grips.

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