Thank You photoclubalpha

[deathvalleydave]

Unfortunately, I am making a leap of faith - I sold all my A900 gear and I ordered the D800.

Thank You to everyone here on this forum who helped me and provided insights into everything dslr.

And Thank You David Kilpatrick for all that you do - I will definitely be visiting your website many times.

After all, it's still a Sony sensor in the D800, right? Not to take anything away from the EVF and SLT technology, I simply prefer a similar style of replacement to the A900, which the D800 is in my mind. Just as a small bit of evidence for anyone interested - when I took some test shots with the D800 and Nikon's 24-120 F4 lens - I was stunned at how impressive the hand held shots I took were - at all focal lengths with that camera/lens combo.

Happy shooting to all and thanks again for all your support over the years!
Dave

[bakubo]

Good luck with your new camera! Please continue to post photos. I do.

[Philip]

Dave,

The D800 is a really good camera - what a replacement A900 should have been (and could still be....). I did the same as you're doing and would like to point out that not only is the sensor probably of Sony origin, but the battery is labelled as of Sony manufacture! So in many ways I am still shooting Sony Hope you get your D800 soon.

Philip

[alphaomega]

deathvalleydave wrote

Unfortunately, I am making a leap of faith - I sold all my A900 gear and I ordered the D800.

I hope you got the first word wrong Dave. It may have been a "leap of faith" if you had not done your homework before making the switch. I cannot believe that the D800 with suitable lenses and accessories is a "leap of faith" other than "was it worth the investment"? Only the additional income and the "return on investment" time will decide if it was a good decision. From a picture taking perspective you cannot go wrong.
I am currently perplexed by the choices being offered up by the various manufacturers. It reminds me of a dinner in Hong Kong where the dishes kept coming and unfortunately for my stomach the food got better and better.
Just been out using my A550, A580, NEX-5 and Pana LX5 and frankly, for me the results were satisfactory. No doubt I could pour say £10,000 into new equipment and my results would be no better for what I want to achieve. That will not prevent me from pouring £900-1000 into a NEX-7 although I don't really need it. I tend to agree with Thom Hogan that we have reached a point where the latest equipment is so good that buying more needs a higher level of irrational decision making.

[deathvalleydave]

I meant "unfortunately" only because the A900 was my favorite dslr camera of all time. I may be paying too much attention to the DXOMark sensor rating for the D800, and I may be over nit picking about the A900's jpeg engine and RAW noise (the RAW being night and day to the jpeg noise), but half of my decision also rested on the future of Sony's technology and where it's going (EVF, SLT), and how Nikon seems to just make the type of 'replacement' to the A900 that I always wanted.

I took some test shots with the D800 and Nikon 24-120 F4 at the shop the other day, and was stunned how good the images came out, hand held. That was the icing on the cake for me.

I look forward to learning more from this forum in the future, and will try to post some interesting D800 shots whenever I finally get it and have something to share...

[redsim74]

Best of luck with the new camera - not that I think you'll need it. The D800 seems an excellent piece of kit.

[David Kilpatrick]

I have made direct comparison shoots with the A900, Nikon D4 and Canon 5D MkIII at ISO 6400 at night. I can not post anything yet as this is work commissioned for another publication/website.

I can say that the A900 has colour values far higher than the Nikon, which in turn has more colour retention than the Canon (which only does high ISO and low light well by losing most of the colour information present). But its 6400 is also half the 'real' speed of the new cameras, and its noise is so much more obtrusive mainly due to the colour component.

Conclusion - you may never see a camera with such narrow-cut, dense, well defined RGB again. It's not equal to medium format RGB which really uses tricolour filtration as good as colour separations. But the A900 will extract colour information and discrimination that the new generation cameras simply lose.

The penalty is that this really only works at ISO 100-400.

David

[pakodominguez]

Conclusion - you may never see a camera with such narrow-cut, dense, well defined RGB again. It's not equal to medium format RGB which really uses tricolour filtration as good as colour separations. But the A900 will extract colour information and discrimination that the new generation cameras simply lose.

Hi David,

Haven't you put the NEX 7 on the same test?

I'm easily working at ISO 1600 while I always fear to go farther than ISO 1000 on the A850/A900. I'm getting with the NEX 7 "similar" color rendering but better detail and overall quality than with the A900.

Regards

[deathvalleydave]

Hi David,

I'm not quite sure what your example explains - are you saying that the A900 has the best colour retention up to 6400? And that the D800 is only comparable at ISO 100-400? DXOMark shows the following:

D800:
25.3 bits color
14.4 ev DR
2853 ISO

A900:
23.7 bits color
12.3 ev DR
1431 ISO

They have not tested the 5DMark3 because they apparently have not received a production camera in France yet, although some experts say that Canon might have paid off DXOMark not to publish the results yet due to it not making any significant advances in their testing like the D800 has - this is all debatable.

With all this said - are you stating that the A900 has better colors than the D800? Please don't get me wrong, I'm only asking out of curiosity - I've already made my decision on the D800 and am just waiting for it to arrive.

[David Kilpatrick]

Dave - I have not used the D800, I'm comparing with the D4 and the 5D MkIII.

Also, colour bit depth has little to do with colour discrimination. Narrow cut filters reduce dynamic range and overall colour gamut, but improve colour saturation and the differences between hues. Sensors tend to have more sensitivity than needed to unwanted colours. I can't remember now whether it's Canon or Nikon claiming 'enhanced infra-red response' for one of the new cams - that is funny, as over the years the idea has been to suppress IR response because it affects colour adversely!

The A900 achieved a better colour rendering than the D3X at the time, because it used denser filters than the Nikon, but the penalty was less sensitivity and more noise.

David

[deathvalleydave]

Hi David,

The whole color debate has always struck me as hard to qualify, based on always hearing people mention, "I like the Sony colors", or "I like the NIkon colors", etc. I'm guessing 14 bit vs 12 bit has nothing to do with it, and I've just never been able to comprehend something that seems subjective - I guess I'm lucky I'm not color blind!

As a landscape photographer, the A900 was my favorite at the time, and now I'm taking that leap of faith over to the D800. I'm extremely pleased to see their 24-120 is actually performing well on the D800! I'm thrilled at the RAW dynamic range the D800 has to offer, and my sample shots reminded me of the A900 look - smooth, buttery, detailed images.

I'm also excited for Sony's future models - because they made the D800 sensor, right? I was actually going to go with the 5DMk3 at first, but I'm feeling a bit 'sorry' for Canon right now due to not much IQ improvement over the 5DMk2, from what I'm reading over and over at dpreview forums. When the A900 came out 4 years ago at $3K I thought it was the best IQ in the world for the price - now I feel the same way about the D800. It will not make me a better photographer, and it might even force me to become better to equal my abilities I had on the A900 - but at the bottom of my heart - I feel I'm still with Sony due to what's in the heart of the D800.

Dave

[bfitzgerald]

If I am correct I think the argument being put forward is something along the lines of (in plain English)
Sony have more colour noise at high ISO levels in order to improve colour retention.

There is a bit of a debate on this for starters DxO suggest there is some NR going on with the A900 sensor even in raw nowhere near the A700 pre firmware fix levels but that's what they say.
My own view right now is that Sony tended to be overly cautious with their metering which didn't exactly help esp in high ISO situations. I saw this with the A200 which would rage on colour noise at high ISO and be a good stop or more off the Km5d metering wise. Addressing the metering to correct that the colour noise was greatly reduced. This is more an issue in low kelvin light where the blue channel would simply go bananas on the Sony and was difficult to remove at the time as ACR was not good at handling high levels of chroma NR.

If you look at the A900 and the A77 on DPR their studio scene is revealing in a number of ways. Firstly the A77 has a significant level of chroma noise v it's rivals and v the A900. Also if you look at the A900 it has some "colour specks/blobs" at high ISO indicating to me that there is compulsory NR going on even in raw. I saw exactly the same thing with Pentax (compare on the DPR site) and you see the same thing much reduced chroma noise, but some blobs of colours which are clearly bigger than a single pixel, though they are more effective at removing colour noise than Sony. I found that colour retention was good on the Pentax models even into high ISO levels. But the downside is that this interfered with LR and it's chroma noise removal, and hot pixels were also an issue I found LR unable to map many out as they were larger than single pixels and probably due to compulsory NR going on.

You also get some visible artefacts on raw files even without any significant processing by the user clumps of pixels and odd shapes at times. This is why I'm dead against any kind of NR going on in raw. Onto the colour retention issue it was noted esp with many of the older CCD models that makers were de-saturating images or it was a by product of the high ISO thus you could see a loss of colour at high ISO levels. This was most obvious with the 10mp CCD and to a degree with the 6mp CCD which clearly does lose colour details at ISO 3200, but a bit at ISO 1600 (not enough IMO to worry about at this level though)

[agorabasta]

Actually, all high-end modern cameras output may get profiled to produce exactly the same colour as Sony cameras do. That's including recent Canons after the 7D, and 5DMkII was last 'poor-red' body from Canon.

Nikon cameras have some specifics that may make colours appear bad, so there are some precautions to take.
First, their raw encoding is non-linear in the highlights; so colours get swayed somewhat, e.g. brighter sky blues turn turquoise well before clipping. So a generous negative EV comp is quite advisable.
Second, they use a rather heavy-handed threshold filtering against stray pixel values. And they do it so that it breaks natural correlation between luma and chroma noise. So the amount of chroma NR in later processing should be very different. For example, the chroma NR in Lr/ACR may be set at 10/0 colour/detail all the way till ISO6400. Using the ACR default 25/50 simply kills the colour detail there.

BTW, in case somebody wants a good really standard profile for a specific non-Sony body, I can make such easily. All I need is a GMB target raw shot at tungsten and at 'horizon sky' (late PM sunny) lighting conditions.

[bfitzgerald]

You can get hue shifts with colours when they are near to saturation point on the sensor, that is not merely a Nikon issue seen that on other models and various cameras over the years esp notable with Panasonic. But much depends on the WB setting too this greatly influences hues.

I will say one thing I was very surprised with the DR improvement on the D90's 12mp CMOS c the Pentax models I had they constantly were blowing out skies. Not so the D90 which clings much better to highlights. Must be a tonal curve issue or something along those lines. One thing is certain, because Sony fab a sensor it can end up quite different in performance depending on who gets hold of it.

As for the NR Raw issue that is a topic on it's own, but I think there is no case for NR on raw whatever the situation. Raw must be raw else it's pointless. A900 showed obvious signs of NR raw at high ISO

[agorabasta]

Not so the D90 which clings much better to highlights. Must be a tonal curve issue or something along those lines.

That's the whole point - Nikon raw encoding is adaptive both in the blacks and in the highlights; and the cheaper the camera, the more adaptive it is as the camera tries to 'help' the user far too much. And no WB may ever help here.
The more advanced cams like d300/700/800 leave the blacks alone but still do some adaptive raw encoding in the highlights. And the Nikon raw in general is too far from being anything really raw.