Photoclubalpha

Romy is the most respectful Canon bird shooter. He has almost all premium Canon lenses and bodies and seemingly unlimited financial support and effort.
Apart from the video, I have always this in doubt that images from A700 always look smeared and less sharp than those from Canon or Nikon. Is there an explanation?

Mark K wrote:I have always this in doubt that images from A700 always look smeared and less sharp than those from Canon or Nikon. Is there an explanation?

The A700 in-camera JPEGs are fairly basic and early A700 high ISO NR disrupted the image. But, across the normal range of ISOs (100-1600) the A700 shot raw is not smeared, or less sharp than Canon or Nikon. Canon uses more sharpening - much more - by default. They also use smoothing, resulting in a strange mix of sharp edges with lack of texture. Nikon clip black very sharply, so that any small shadows or dark edges appear as 0 black level where the Sony may show them as a shade of grey (and has more shadow detail in reserve). Nikon add a very steep transfer curve, which makes the midtone range contrasty and bright, compared to a relatively flat curve in the Sony cameras generally (except the A100). This can make images appear to have more sharpness, as the eye sees contrast as sharpness.

You can imitate the Canon or Nikon look easily enough. One of the first steps is the set the curve 'Strong Contrast' when using Adobe Camera Raw, in place of the default 'Medium Contrast' curve.

David

I find the 5DMk2 JPEGs totally horrible - low-contrast details smeared away totally, while higher contrast transitions oversharpened. Funny thing is that Canon seems to use the same jpeg 'strategy' in far cheaper cameras like G9-G10. Those Canon jpegs now look almost as ugly as off some Ricoh R7/R8.

The a700 XFINE JPEGs can be very nice actually, especially if those 'creative styles' are fine-tuned and not left at their defaults. To me, the best sharpening for no further PP is -1 or -3/-2 for further PP.
The 'fine' JPEGs cannot really take any PP, as artifacts instantly become obvious at minimum PP.

There's one peculiar use I found of a700 'fine' JPEGs though - shoot high ISO cRAW+JPEG BW, then use the BW jpeg for luma while adding chroma from the cRAW developed/processed to get the best/cleanest colour only, as the luma from the RAW is discarded anyway.

agorabasta wrote:I find the 5DMk2 JPEGs totally horrible - low-contrast details smeared away totally, while higher contrast transitions oversharpened. Funny thing is that Canon seems to use the same jpeg 'strategy' in far cheaper cameras like G9-G10. Those Canon jpegs now look almost as ugly as off some Ricoh R7/R8.

I got on one of the sites that has comparison photos, and I'm pretty sure it was the G10 that I compared against my P&S camera, and the G10 just didn't look nearly as good. I don't know what the deal was, but it seemed to me that the lens was not up to the number of pixels, but that's just a guess on my part. I'm keeping my V3.... But anyway, it seems that a lot of the cameras in recent couple of years have a odd smeary watercolor look to them.


One thing about the A100, even though it could be noisy, I never saw a watercolor effect. High ISO is still flawed in JPEG, and while I wish it could be better, it also could be worse....

DK mentioned that the A100 is different regarding its transfer curve? How so, and do I need to do anything about it?

....
There's one peculiar use I found of a700 'fine' JPEGs though - shoot high ISO cRAW+JPEG BW, then use the BW jpeg for luma while adding chroma from the cRAW developed/processed to get the best/cleanest colour only, as the luma from the RAW is discarded anyway.

Doesn't the in-camera JPEG come from the same RAW material? Not sure why this is a benefit. If you wanted, couldn't you process a separate B&W from the RAW file?


Also, I've been wondering -- your trick with high ISO and the zone matching... is there a zone matching setting for the A100 to do something similar?

Vidgamer wrote:

agorabasta wrote: ....
There's one peculiar use I found of a700 'fine' JPEGs though - shoot high ISO cRAW+JPEG BW, then use the BW jpeg for luma while adding chroma from the cRAW developed/processed to get the best/cleanest colour only, as the luma from the RAW is discarded anyway.

Doesn't the in-camera JPEG come from the same RAW material? Not sure why this is a benefit. If you wanted, couldn't you process a separate B&W from the RAW file?


Also, I've been wondering -- your trick with high ISO and the zone matching... is there a zone matching setting for the A100 to do something similar?

The in-cam jpeg saves me one step, as to use the same trick without it, I'd have to develop the RAW twice - once for luma, once for chroma. (The advantage of dual development comes from the fact that single development normally cannot be optimal for both luma and chroma at the same time.) And the in-cam jpeg has the opportunity to use in-cam DRO that's far more advanced than any reasonable soft alternative, especially in regard of time/effort it consumes. And I really like the how the camera engine deals with DR and local contrast...

Regarding the ZM trick for a100 I really don't have any bright ideas. I don't even have an a100 to play with.
As there are no ZM/brightness controls in it, the only variables available are DRO, contrast and AE compensation. There could be some advantage noise-wise if it's set at DRO-advanced, contrast +1, AE +1/3 or +2/3 - but that's 'from the top of my head', really.

Canon does a good job at NR. The image looks only slightly softer from the Canon. Sony should really pour some R&D into NR, and not the heavy-handed watercolour kind please.

Edit: Though after a pass in NoiseNinja the A900 shot does not look that bad, the noise itself is very good looking once the colour noise has been removed. It looks very film-ish.