Getting the most reach out of your long lenses...

[Tipton]

So I found something out today, that I could kick myself for not having tried before.
You can put a full frame camera into crop mode; you get a 1.5x crop factor, meaning my FE 70-300mm is now a 105-450mm equivalent.
You can use "Clear Image Zoom" to get a 2x electronic zoom on most lenses; yielding a 140-600mm focal length equivalent; the drawback is that you only have jpg.
But today I found out you can use both at the same time...210-900mm, oh yeah, that's the stuff baby!
How are the pics? Well, accepting that they're jpg only...not bad. (The weather wasn't that great, either. You take what you can get in March in Michigan.)

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[bdbits]

I've never played with either one of these settings. I guess I have always thought to myself "same result as crop/resize in post". Although, it seems to me I read "Clear Image Zoom" is not a straight crop. It interpolates pixels or something similar, so should be better than a straight crop, everything else being equal. But I am quite sure that APS-C is a crop, and I believe you can even undo the crop in post.

I definitely can see the benefit from a composition standpoint, and perhaps focus, so I am not dismissing either feature. Just wondering if anyone knows if the end result of using both is close to shooting at full resolution and cropping.

 

[Tipton]

But I am quite sure that APS-C is a crop, and I believe you can even undo the crop in post.

APS-C mode on a full frame camera is a crop, but I don't know how you would undo the crop in post, because it's an in camera crop, saved to the raw file or jpg as the case may be.

 

[bdbits]

I don't know where I got the idea from, but had the impression the camera had the full sensor data in the RAW data and somehow indicated the crop. And then I remembered maybe it was aspect ratio. So I did the unthinkable.

I took a picture. A few of them in fact.

In Capture One at least, when looking at APS-C-mode photos from an A7ii, there is no crop showing in the editor that you can undo. However, if you set the camera to 16:9 instead of 3:2 aspect ratio, jpegs will crop in camera but RAWs ignore it and show the full sensor data (so uncropped) regardless of chosen aspect ratio. At least that is how it is with Capture One.

The affect on video is left as an exercise to the reader.

 

[pellicle]

So I found something out today, that I could kick myself for not having tried before.
You can put a full frame camera into crop mode; you get a 1.5x crop factor, meaning my FE 70-300mm is now a 105-450mm equivalent.
You can use "Clear Image Zoom" to get a 2x electronic zoom on most lenses; yielding a 140-600mm focal length equivalent; the drawback is that you only have jpg.

did you take side by side versions (meaning crop mode vs crop it yourself in post)?

 

[Tipton]

did you take side by side versions (meaning crop mode vs crop it yourself in post)?

Nope. Not yet, anyways.

 

[Gandalf]

Using crop mode in the camera saves space on the SD card, but it's exactly the same result as if you had cropped the full frame in post.

Clear Image zoom, I have not tried. Guess I need to get busy.

 

[Tipton]

Oddly, Clear Image Zoom doesn't work with the 18-105 f4 PZ lens.

 

[Kinlau]

Using crop mode also has the benefit of being able to see better as you shoot. You can actually see what’s in the birds mouth, or which way it’s looking, etc.

Trying to cull pics that are only a quarter of the frame can be time consuming. Easier if they’re already cropped.