Why do superzoom and bridge cameras extend the telephoto end more than the wide-angle end?
Asked 4/9/2015
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Many bridge and superzoom cameras advertise ever-longer telephoto ranges, such as 24–2000mm equivalent, but their wide end often stays around 24mm equivalent instead of going much wider. Why do manufacturers tend to increase zoom range on the telephoto side rather than offering something like 12–1000mm equivalent? Is this mainly due to lens design limits, cost, or the small sensor format these cameras use?
Originally by Photography Stack Exchange contributor. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
Photography Stack Exchange contributor
11y ago
2 Answers
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The biggest factor that I can think of is cost and complexity around the lens design. Lens focal lengths that are shorter than the distance from the lens mount to the sensor (flange-focal distance) need to be designed with what amounts to reverse telephoto (retrofocus) lens at the end in order to make up the distance and the complexity level of that gets much greater as the spread between the focal length and flange-focal distance grows. Getting it really wide without going fisheye gets really hard and really expensive and you can't go fisheye on a superzoom.
Now, the P900 is a bridge camera and so they have the ability to bring that distance in, but then you're balancing against other considerations such as the telephoto end. The wide end is actually a real focal length of 4.3mm which is already a very short focal length even on a mirrorless body and it's a pretty complex lens construction of 16 elements in 12 groups. So, I think what you have there is the bang-for-the-buck trade-off that they have to make and a 24mm equivalent is still a pretty wide angle for most purposes.
Originally by user472. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
user472
11y ago
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Mostly because making the lens much wider is harder, more complex, and more expensive than extending the telephoto end—especially while keeping a huge zoom range.
Very short focal lengths require more difficult optical designs to avoid distortion and fisheye-like rendering. On interchangeable-lens cameras this is tied to retrofocus design constraints; on bridge cameras the packaging is different, but the tradeoff remains: pushing the wide end much farther while also keeping an extreme telephoto end makes the lens design significantly more challenging.
Small-sensor cameras are also built around their main advantage: achieving very long equivalent focal lengths in a compact, affordable package. A 1/2.3" sensor can deliver a 2000mm-equivalent field of view with optical stabilization in a way that would be enormous and very expensive on APS-C or full-frame systems. That is the feature manufacturers emphasize.
So the short answer is: telephoto extension is the easier and more marketable direction for these cameras, while extreme wide-angle coverage in the same superzoom lens would add major design difficulty, cost, and compromises.
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