Hi from Edinburgh, a Sony R1 user upgrading

[Chris Malcolm]

Decades ago I was a Minolta XG2 SLR user who now and then traded photographs for the money to buy more kit, but for the last ten years the old XG2 had collected much more dust than photographs. I'd been vaguely waiting for the digital camera market to settle down before investing much in it. By "settle down" I meant that the high end market still seemed dominated by obsolescent design concepts from the film era such as the SLR mirror, and sensor sizes were being revised almost annually.

I wanted a rather good P&S to keep me going until the market settled down, which I suspected would be somewhere around 30MP with an exchangeable lens camera system without the SLR mirror because live view and focus without them had become good enough.

I decided a year ago that the Sony R1 looked like a good stop gap for me and got one plus the optional extra secondary extension lenses. It turned out to be even better than I'd hoped, and I became a reborn photography enthusiast and a great fan of the R1 design philosophy. I did however find myself wanting a bit more wide angle and a bit more tele length than the R1's extension lenses provided, especially at the wide end. I'm a fan of architectural photography, and I really missed not being able to get right down to a 90 degree field of view. Edinburgh is a very photogenic city, built on and around seven hills by means of heroic Georgian and Victorian feats of civil engineering. Now we have our own parliament (devolved from the Westminster UK parliament) Edinburgh is also the focus of a lot of ambitious modern architecture and planning. Excellent city to wander with a camera

My R1 recently suffered an accident requiring hospitalisation to cure, which convinced me the serious photographer needs two cameras in case one of them isn't feeling well. This happened at just about the time that DK was extolling the eccentric virtues of the Sony A350, which looked rather like what the R1 design team might have come up with if told this time it had to be a DSLR. So as a complementary upgrade to the R1 I ordered an A350 with a SAL 18-250mm and Sigma 10-20mm zooms.

I'm still in the very early stages of learning how to get the best from this lot, which is complicated by the rather wide variations in in-camera jpeg control options whose standard defaults are a lot further under the RAW performance than is the case with the R1. I'm delighted however to find that for at least some of their ranges these two zooms on the A350 offer even a bit better edge to edge detail resolution than the extra 40% of extra pixels over the 10MP R1 would suggest, which suggests that these lenses are even better at detail resolution than the rather good R1 zoom. They're also better over at least quite a bit of their ranges with respect to chromatic aberration. They're a bit flatter, lower in contrast, but that's maybe inevitable in lenses with more elements, or maybe coping with the wider dynamic range.

If I've got the hang of this URL thing here's a comparative architectural view taken by both the R1 and the A350.

So far so delightful, and thanks a lot to David for pointing me in this happy direction

Chris Malcolm

[David Kilpatrick]

It's useful in a way to have lenses with simple distortions, and both the 18-250mm and 10-20mm fit that class. The 11-18mm Sony is better without correction, but much harder to correct fully as it has a compound correction for distortion already built in (wavy lines).

Those are great pix Chris, I know Ocean Terminal well enough but I must be blind as that office block has totally escaped being spotted... the light in Leith can be so beautifully crisp as well, when it's not beautifully hazy.

David

[Chris Malcolm]

If by "simple" you mean either adjustable barrel or pincushion, then the Sigma 10-20mm geometric distortion isn't simple in that sense. At 10mm, it's almost moustache, being pretty flat until close to the edges where it suddenly drops into a much more barrellish curve. So it's a combination of at least two curves. Nevertheless, PTLens seems to correct that very well, so I suspect the lens models which PTLens uses aren't simple.

Not only does PTLens have good models of the distortions of both these lenses as their focal length varies, it has noted that those are the only two lenses I'm using, reads the focal length from the EXIF data, and selects the appropriate lens correction model automatically. Except in the case of the small overlap in range coverage (18-20mm), when it asks me which of the two lenses is being used. So good linear geometric correction is achieved very simply indeed.

I didn't know if PTLens would be able to handle the Sigma 10-20mm, or how it would handle multiple lens choices, and I'm impressed that in this case it's done both very well.