Re: Wow! D200 with and without AA filter

Me <user@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Chris Malcolm wrote:
John Sheehy <JPS@xxxxxxx> wrote:
"Rita Berkowitz" <ritaberk2008@xxxxxxx> wrote in
news:4u6dnXdYopmn8hvVnZ2dnUVZ_oTinZ2d@xxxxxxxxxxxxx:

RichA wrote:

I still wonder about lens resolution and sensor resolution.
According to Olympus, a decent quality lens should be good for a
sensor density of 20 megapixels at 4/3rds size which means 33
megapixels on a 1.5 sensor..

Maybe this is one major reason why many 1Ds Mk III shooters are
migrating over to the D3? It seems logical since L glass hasn't been
setting any benchmarks in the IQ department.

Could it be that they're comparing the 1Dsmk3 against the D3 at 100% pixel
view, with all the heavy NR that comes default with Nikons, against the
more natural-looking default conversion style of Canons?

Is this noise reduction unavoidably applied to the camera's RAW files
in camera?

No.

Or are you suggesting that many high end DSLR users accept
the jpeg conversions supplied as part of the package deal, and will
switch camera brands simply on the basis of easily avoidable jpeg
quirks?

High iso NR can be toggled off in the menu.
A proviso with that is that some small amount of NR is still applied to
raw files using Nikon software (Capture NX), but that can also be
toggled off if you dive through the camera settings menu in the program.

I've been wondering that ever since I discovered that a lot of
dpreview's tests, which I had assumed were aimed at the discerning and
knowledgeable user, nevertheless take the camera's jpegs and their
default jpeg control settings for granted.

The alternative is far too complex for a site like DPReview. A chart
with samples of 9 iso settings, and noise performance, effect of noise
reduction settings at 4 different levels (off, low, medium, high), for
jpeg and raw, with standardised exposure and measurement of dr / s-n
ratio might not be popular for the multitudes of viewers of their site.
They also make the mistake of posting only 100% sample crops - not an
entirely reasonable comparison of performance between cameras with
different pixel count.

OTOH, perhaps it would be better if they tweaked settings until they got
the best result (in their subjective opinion) and just posted those.
Second thought - it wouldn't as they're already accused of bias much of
the time, and that would just open the flood-gates.

If they tweaked until they got the best subjective result then they
could of course be accused of subjective bias, but in the case of
resolution of detail there's no need to be subjective about it, there
are objective tests which they already use. I know that some have
argued that those tests are misleading and incomplete, because they're
based on high contrast detail. There are cameras (and noise reducers)
which do well at high contrast detail but remove low contrast
detail. But that fair and reasonable quibble doesn't alter the fact
that there are objective tests of resolution which can be used.

Manufacturers do take widely differing stances on how aggressively to
noise reduce their best ex-camera jpegs at the camera's default jpeg
settings. Some clearly want to give you as much detail as possible,
even at the cost of some noise, whereas others regard noise an evil to
be removed even at the cost of detail. Then on top of that some will
give you a range of adjustment of jpeg control parameters which allow
the user to adjust things to recover nearly all of the detail
available in RAW, while others don't, presumably because they expect
the fussy user to be using RAW.

I suspect I'm far from alone in thinking that there's an important
difference between those cameras which can produce jpegs which comtain
all the detail of RAW except in difficult cases where important detail
is present at the extremes of dynamic range, and those whose jpegs are
always less detailed than RAW unless you're shooting atrmospheric
shots in fog or something. In the first case you only need to shoot
RAW in certain difficult cases to get the image quality the camera can
produce, whereas in the second case you must shoot RAW all the time
because jpegs are always inferior.

Omitting to distinguish between those cameras with poor jpegs and
those with good jpegs (compared to what can be got from RAW image
files) is rather like comparing two DLSRs with the entry level kit
lens package offered by the manufacturer, and ignoring the possibility
that while one maker offers the best kit lens and the best image
quality with the kit lens, it's the other who offers the best image
quality with the best lenses.

--
Chris Malcolm cam@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx DoD #205
IPAB, Informatics, JCMB, King's Buildings, Edinburgh, EH9 3JZ, UK
[http://www.dai.ed.ac.uk/homes/cam/]

.

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