DSLR/Mirrorless Q’s

I feel stupid asking some of these, but i don’t have easy access to a brick and mortar camera store, and no way I’m going into a Big Box store and playing with shared toys.  Background, if you wish.  My wife is fairly new to, but very enthusiastically taking nature photos.  Her vision sucks. She’s using my 1DIV.  I’m using the 5DIV and love it, but I’m intrigued by some of the features of the R5 & R6.  Questions:

1) This should be simple math, but I don’t like my answer, so I’m double checking.  The R6 is 20 Mp (full frame).  The 1DIV is a 16 amp APS-H (1.3x crop).  She’d lose significant crop ability / pixels per duck, right?

2) Re: the viewfinders.  Heather has a very difficult time focusing the DSLR - she’ll hope the camera gets it for a few shots, then she’ll switch to Live View and magnify the view - great technique for landscapes, but tough for walk-around hand held telephoto shots of birds / bugs.  This is possible through the viewfinder of Mirrorless, right?  (Is this “Focus peeking”?)

Other thoughts / considerations?

Thanks!

Yes, cropping the R6 will leave her with around 12 Megs I believe. Focus peaking gives you coloured edges on areas that are in focus, but most mirrorless will also allow you to "zoom" in the image so you can focus on a very small area. Some, like Olympus cameras, will even function in continuous AF while zoomed in. I would think mirrorless would be a big help to her as it is much easier to see the scene when the light is dim.

Scott Fairbairn wrote:Yes, cropping the R6 will leave her with around 12 Megs I believe. Focus peaking gives you coloured edges on areas that are in focus, but most mirrorless will also allow you to "zoom" in the image so you can focus on a very small area. Some, like Olympus cameras, will even function in continuous AF while zoomed in. I would think mirrorless would be a big help to her as it is much easier to see the scene when the light is dim.

Thank you, Sir!

The simple way to calculate this is MP/(crop^2). So if you have a 20mp camera and cropping it to 1.3x field of vie (aka APSH) you get 20/(1.3^2) = 11.8

E.J. Peiker wrote:The simple way to calculate this is MP/(crop^2).  So if you have a 20mp camera and cropping it to 1.3x field of vie (aka APSH) you get 20/(1.3^2) = 11.8

Yep - that’s what I did, I just didn’t like the answer I got!

Focus peaking is a function in which pixels in areas of an image in sharp focus are painted a bright color, generally red or yellow. It can be quite useful in macro & close-up photography, especially when hand-holding the camera and/or when the subject is moving. I find it also useful when 'focus stacking' as it helps to visualize and track the plane of focus as the stack is acquired. In landscape photography, it can help to see whether the foreground is in focus.

cwdavis wrote:Focus peaking is a function in which pixels in areas of an image in sharp focus are painted a bright color, generally red or yellow.  It can be quite useful in macro & close-up photography, especially when hand-holding the camera and/or when the subject is moving.  I find it also useful when 'focus stacking' as it helps to visualize and track the plane of focus as the stack is acquired.  In landscape photography, it can help to see whether the foreground is in focus.

Thank you!  Sounds extremely useful.