Crop lenses FASTER?

I was thinking... point and shoot cameras with their relatively small sensor can have a 2.8 aperture at the wide end. (this is partly due to that fact that the focal length is about 5mm) but the lens itself is very small too.
so therefore, would aperture be related to the sensor size.


If you take a 35L and ONLY change its design to reduce the image circle for a crop body (therefore, size is the same as the original EF 35L), will the max aperture be higher than 1.4?

Chiva wrote in post #5158232
I was thinking... point and shoot cameras with their relatively small sensor can have a 2.8 aperture at the wide end. (this is partly due to that fact that the focal length is about 5mm) but the lens itself is very small too.
so therefore, would aperture be related to the sensor size.

If you take a 35L and ONLY change its design to reduce the image circle for a crop body (therefore, size is the same as the original EF 35L), will the max aperture be higher than 1.4?

Plausibly, lenses designed straight up for smaller sensors could be either faster or smaller than their FF equivalents. Olympus has taken advantage of this with their 4/3rds format system which was designed from the ground up for a smaller sensor.

IMO, the Canon and Nikon smaller format lenses have a lot less to gain. The problem is, despite having a smaller image circle to cover, the EF-S lenses still must maintain the same distance from the lens mount to the image sensor. For most wide angle lenses this distance is much greater than optimal. The result is extreme retrofocus designs which drives back size, weight and cost.

Canon tried to mitigate this retrofocus penalty to some degree by moving the rear element back as far as possible (EF-S) and Nikon did not. Either way, I think al of the lenses that start at 10mm or 18mm suffer from this retrofocus penalty which is why they are all bigger / costlier than you might otherwise expect.

Chiva wrote in post #5158232
If you take a 35L and ONLY change its design to reduce the image circle for a crop body (therefore, size is the same as the original EF 35L), will the max aperture be higher than 1.4?

Nope. It's still got a 35mm focal length and a 25mm diameter iris, so it's still a 35 f/1.4.

-js