Brought to You by the March of Technology

A lot of the very earliest digital cameras came from digital companies. The first one I remember playing with was an Apple QuickTake* 100 (actually built for Apple by Kodak, an early pioneer in digital imaging) and not long after that, the Logitech Fotoman Pixtura, which was so similar to the Apple product that I was unsurprised to find out that it, too was a Kodak design.

Most of the very earliest professional-grade DSLR's were made by imaging companies like Fuji or Kodak grafting their sensor hardware onto the backs of Nikon & Canon film SLR's. After a few years of this, Canon and Nikon decided they didn't need the imaging companies anymore and started making their own.

The thing is, professional cameras needed big sensors, and big sensors were crazy expensive back then. When Nikon launched the groundbreaking D1, their first solo in-house DSLR, to much fanfare in 1999, the sticker price was $4,999. That's almost eight grand in today's money according to usinflationcalculator.com. A big chunk of that price was the sensor, and even then there was a compromise.

The need for the larger sensors was because Canon and Nikon both had enormous infrastructure in lens manufacturing that was all based around projecting an image onto a 35mm negative, which is to say an image surface measuring 36x24mm. If the sensors were made too small, these existing lenses would be useless. But if the sensors were made the same size as a 35mm negative, they'd be hideously expensive and out of reach of most of the consumer market.

Indeed, Canon's first professional DSLR with a "full frame" 36x24mm sensor, the EOS 1Ds, dropped in 2003, and it stickered at $7999 in a year when just another few grand would get you into the driver's seat of a new car...even if the new car was just a Hyundai Accent.

So for most of the Aughties, the solution for Canon and Nikon was to make slightly smaller sensors in a size known as APS-C, aping a short-lived film format. These were big enough to use the existing 35mm lenses, albeit with a "crop factor" that made them act as if their focal length were 1.5x longer (or 1.6x for Canon, whose APS-C sensor was a teeny bit smaller.) These smaller sensors allowed Canon to release the Digital Rebel, the first DSLR to hit the market with a sub-$1k price tag.

"Full Frame" sensors remained confined to higher-end cameras, although they trickled into Prosumer-level models like the 5D and D700 which were still expensive, but not unattainably so. More expensive than most bicycles but cheaper than a dirt bike, more expensive than a Kimber but cheaper than a Wilson. Dedicated hobbyists could buy these.

The punchline here, of course, is that with sensors getting cheaper and cheaper, Full Frame has become more and more accessible. Canon's current Full Frame enthusiast camera, the 6D Mark II, is on sale at Amazon for $1,199. Adjusted for inflation, that APS-C sensor $899 Digital Rebel in 2003 cost $1,253 in 2019 dollars.  Lose the complexity of the mirror and the viewfinder prism, and you can get a full-frame Sony a7 II for $898.

Pretty cool that what was once an unobtainium luxury for anybody who couldn't write it off as a business expense is now a thing pretty much any hobbyist can acquire.

*Interesting that the spellchecker in the browser recognizes "QuickTake" as being spelled correctly. Of course, I'm using Safari, so that probably explains it...