From the course: Advanced Photography: Medium-Format Digital Cameras

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Comparing autofocus and viewfinders

Comparing autofocus and viewfinders

From the course: Advanced Photography: Medium-Format Digital Cameras

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Comparing autofocus and viewfinders

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- The autofocus systems in most full-frame and crop sensor cameras are usually built around a phase detection system. Phase detection works great in low light and is very fast. For the most part, it has replaced the previously dominant contrast detection system, which is a bit slower and doesn't work so well in low-contrast situations. However, phase detection requires additional sensors inside the camera. That might be the reason that all three of these camera manufacturers decided to go with contrast detection in these smaller medium-format cameras. When you're already worried about the size and cost of your camera, reducing components might be a way to make it cheaper and smaller. Contrast detection works by analyzing the image that is being captured by the sensor, which means it shouldn't be such a good choice for a camera with so many pixels. 50 mega pixels is a lot of data to analyze. Right now, the state of the art of autofocus for small medium-format cameras can be summed up…

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