Can You Use Sony Full Frame Lenses With Aps-c Cameras

There's no denying the image quality produced by full-frame lenses, but when to utilise APS-C lenses instead of full-frame?

Turn your lens around and you'll see that lenses are designed with an imaging circumvolve around the portion of the optic that mounts into your photographic camera trunk. This image circumvolve collaborates with your sensor, and as such lenses are designed to be used with specific sensor sizes.

A total-frame lens is roughly equivalent to a 35mm frame of pic, while an APS-C sensor is a picayune bit smaller.

When you mount a full-frame lens on a photographic camera with an APS-C sensor yous will become what is called a crop cistron. This means your photographic camera's APS-C-size sensor magnifies the scene to produce an paradigm that will lucifer the lens's full-frame image circle.

The outcome is that a 50mm full frame lens mounted on an APS-C body with a 1.5x crop factor volition capture a field-of-view that is the aforementioned as a 75mm on a total frame body.

For Canon, this crop factor is 1.6x. For Nikon, Sony, Pentax, it'due south 1.5x. For Micro Four Thirds, it's 2x.

Find the latest deals on Canon APS-C lenses at Amazon Britain and Amazon United states of america
Find the latest deals on Nikon APS-C lenses at Amazon UK and Amazon US
Discover the latest deals on Sony APS-C lenses at Amazon Great britain and Amazon United states

Then as you've probably figured out, if you accept a full-frame lens with an paradigm circle bigger than your camera'due south sensor, your camera will only tape an image from the eye of that imaging circle. This means you are capturing less of your scene when you mount a total-frame lens on an APS-C-sensor camera.

For portraiture this isn't an issue, simply if you are shooting sport or wildlife or landscape photography, even, you sometimes want to capture as much of the scene as possible.

And then the master do good of using APS-C lenses and tertiary-party equivalents instead of full-frame is that these 'crop' lenses offering wider coverage for those times when you demand to capture as much of the scene as possible.

Another thing to consider is that you can sometimes get more than flare in your images when using a full-frame lens on an APS-C photographic camera body. This is because an APS-C lens has a narrower field of view, so if you're shooting shut to the lord's day the low-cal has no concrete path through the lens.

This really simply happens though when you're shooting in very bright conditions or right next to a chief light source.

A discussion of warning: as reader Rob Bridden rightly pointed out on Facebook, attaching Canon EF-S lenses to full-frame cameras can cause damage to the mirror machinery of your camera. This is due to the actress long baffle on the mountain. This can be an expensive repair job, and so it's best avoided with EF-S lenses.

Which full-frame cameras allow APS-C lenses?

Nikon and Sony both allow their full-frame and APS-C lenses to be used interchangeably with their full-frame and APS-C format cameras. This ways y'all can mount your Sony or Nikon crop lenses onto Sony or Nikon full-frame bodies.

The cameras then offer a 'crop' manner you can enable when using APS-C lenses. This volition effectively tell the camera non to use the data from the entire full-frame sensor, simply rather extract an APS-C-size crop from it. This provides the effect of shooting with a longer lens.

Canon EF and EF-S mounts are different. Ingather lenses sit down deeper into the body in Canon's APS-C DSLRs. Mounting these EF-S lenses on full-frame Catechism DSLRs could cause internal damage to your camera, as the bayonet could bump confronting internal elements.

By making the two mounts different, Canon prevents EF-Due south lenses from being mounted on a full-frame camera. It's also worth noting that Canon's M-series lenses for its APS-C mirrorless cameras cannot mountain onto its full-frame EF or R mounts.

Best Nikon DX lenses: AF-S DX 10-24mm f/3.5-4.5G

Why use Sony and Nikon ingather way?

Being able to turn crop manner on and off for different focal length effects ways fewer lenses you lot have to lug effectually. Of course, you are sacrificing some image quality past using fewer pixels. Merely if you are a wedding lensman, for instance, the trade-off in resolution could exist handy, as you're less probable to miss primal moments by irresolute lenses.

APS-C lens prices vs full-frame

The other big reason you might cull an APS-C lens over a full-frame optic, of course, is that APS-C lenses are much cheaper to manufacture, which means you can buy them for much less money.

Let's look at Nikon equally an example. Nikon'due south standard APS lens, the18-55 F3.5-5.6G AF-P VR, this gives photographers an constructive focal length equivalent to 27-83mm on a camera such every bit the Nikon D5300

This standard lens volition cost you around £lxx on its own and is oft much cheaper when purchased in a kit with the camera torso.

Nikon tin can sell this lens for so much less than its college-end, full-frame lenses considering it is significantly smaller, lighter and easier to manufacture. It has fewer plush components, meaning Nikon can churn them out quickly with fewer costs to pass on to the consumer.

Nikon's total-frame FX sixteen-35mm, on the other hand, offers a similar focal length to its APS-C standard lens, merely this FX wide-angle zoom will cost you up of £1000.

That's because information technology's much bigger, heavier, has a more circuitous interior design and costs more than money and takes longer to produce.

Reasons for using full-frame lenses over APS-C

I'chiliad going to be commenting simply from the perspective of crop gene here. Obviously yous would use a full-frame lens over an APS-C lens for image quality reasons.

But for those times when you desire the wider coverage, there are some counterpoints to consider for mounting that total-frame lens on your APS-C body.

For starters, in one case you showtime shooting at focal lengths of 24mm or more, the advantages of making lenses with modest image circles for reduced sensor sizes are less pronounced.

You'll also find less vignetting in your images when using a full-frame lens on an APS-C body.

Total-frame lenses likewise allow you to use teleconverters (though sadly not with Canon EF-South lenses, as these can cause impairment).