I don't know what magic they must use, but it seems like they use Sony sensors, so you'd think they'd be "close" at the hardware level. At the software level, well, then you should be able to deal with the raw. It's clear that Sony still doesn't handle JPEGs as well, but I think that's a separate issue.Sonolta wrote:It's not the same as crushing blacks after the fact....Nikon achieves *top notch* noise control with the methods they use and you can't duplicate that by crushing blacks in your raw converter. You can improve the look of your some of your photos but you won't get Nikon noise performance by simply crushing blacks.
A friend was showing me photos from his older Nikon (I forget which), and he complained about the noise in some of his low-light photos. Yes there was noise, but it didn't seem that bad to me. Probably better than my A100, and probably would look fine printed at reasonable (non-poster) sizes. Looking at the raw file, you could see a ton of noise in some black basketball shorts. If anything, these blacks needed to be crushed! I increased the contrast and brightness and fiddled with some other settings in the RAW converter, and to my eyes, it was much better.
At this event, I took a lot of ISO 800 and 1600 photos. The light was extremely low, and the shutter speed ensured that a lot of things were a bit too blurry. The main thing you notice is, of course, how noisy the photos were. Even downsized, if you look at my flickr photos, you can see how grainy they are. But this one that I processed from RAW does look a lot better.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/9644425@N06/2833544721/
Yeah, I crushed the blacks and ran it through noise reduction. I could have left it where you can kind of see the stands and people in the background, but they aren't exactly that interesting to begin with. So, push them into the dark along with the noise.
It's amazing how much detail there is (along with the noise) so if I were that interested in the background, I'd leave it in. Also, I'm convinced that it's not possible to have really good NR with JPEG. The camera has to do quick-and-dirty processing to get that photo onto storage and make room for the next one. I'm sure some processors are better than others, but I realized a long time ago that if I needed to work on low-light photos, I needed to use RAW.
I agree with some of what he has to say, but sometimes it seems like he says a lot of contradictory things. I don't know, I just wouldn't use him as a sole source to back up an argument.Rockwell is Rockwell....he's always been Ken Rockwell.
I doubt the 5D would sell in today's market with its resolution... 6mp? Clearly, adding pixels causes some compromise, but if its a simple tradeoff of detail vs. noise, then I think it's a fair tradeoff for most people.I owned an A100 and it was far to noisy at ISO 800 to get usable 8x12's in my home arena. I loved the detail it gave me outdoors and shooting macro but the noise levels were unacceptable for most low light shooting even with a lineup of f2.8 lenses and below. A later firmware upgrade improved things a bit but I had already dumped mine for an A700. I kept the KM5D as my backup camera instead of the A100 because the A100 could not perform well enough in low light.
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Not bad considering the KM5D is one year older than the A100...
-Sonolta
I'm just surprised at how well the A100 keeps up with the latest Sony cameras, particularly given how much some complained about the noise. Well, a lot of the noise is still there....
