>>3663870>But full frame lens costs are still much higher - outside of the basic primes.Not really, when you take into account the aperture equivalency. I.e., yes, a 17-55/2.8 might cost less than a 24-70/2.8, but it costs more than a 24-70/4, and on full frame, f/4 gives you the same depth of field and same ability to shoot in low light as f/2.8 on crop.
>I think APS-C will still have a place for semi-serious situations, high speed photos and in mirrorless.Speed is barely a factor of size--it might be a little slower to flap a full frame mirror out of the way vs a crop mirror, but you don't have mirrors with mirrorless cameras. Especially as the technology for electronic rather than physical shutters gets better, it's gonna be just as fast to read a full frame sensor at the same resolution as a crop one. So speed is a niche that will dwindle rapidly, if it's even still there at all.
It still has something of a niche for "semi-serious" situations, but that's just because of price. If faced with a $500 APS-C camera and a $500 full frame camera, no one's going to think "Well, the full frame camera's image quality is better, but I don't *need* the better image quality, so I'll just pay the same price for a worse camera."
There's a certain amount of expense that goes into building a camera. A lot of those expenses are identical regardless of whether you're building a crop camera or full frame, such as:
* Material cost for all of the camera besides the sensor
* R&D
* Marketing
* Assembly
* Peripherals like the battery and charger
* Packaging
etc.
Each year, the slice of that pie chart specifically tied to the size of the sensor gets a little smaller. Eventually, the extra cost of the part will be so small that it doesn't make sense to cheap out--they'll save more money by not having to maintain multiple parallel camera lines. We've already seen this happen once, when Canon dropped the 1.3x chips in the 1D line.
