Definitive A900/D3X noise/ISO samples

[Vidgamer]

http://www.flickr.com/photos/9644425@N06/2833544721

ISO 1600.

No, I don't go out of my way to use 1600, but when it's really that dark, you do what you gotta do. I spent a lot of time on this one, to try different RAW converters and different settings. Viewed at 100%, it has imperfections. Hard to see them at this reduced size, or printed.

I never claimed that the A100 was a high ISO monster, so I don't know why you keep trying to put words in my mouth. A bit of a straw-man argument. I like the A100 for what it does for me, and for what it can do that the P&S crowd cannot.

[picman]

More comparisons

http://www.luminous-landscape.com/revie ... .shtml#con" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Cheers, Bob.

[David Kilpatrick]

Camera Raw does no favours to any of these cameras at high ISO, but Reichmann no doubt knew that. He avoided one other simple comparison, easily done without extra work - in-camera JPEG. I know why he avoided it, too. By giving exactly the same exposure with all three cameras, he will have ended up with different density raw files needing a range of different corrections in ACR. He has already compromised accuracy by grey-balance setting in ACR. In some ways his test is very fair because it judges the three on a similar final result from identical exposure/ISO settings. In other ways it is not, because you can sure the in-camera JPEGs and default raw conversions will look entirely different - including their relative noise levels.

David

[Vidgamer]

You love the A100...you are it's biggest fan!

It's a good camera. As you can see, it works pretty well, even at high ISO. My P&S, that you would like me to return to, couldn't come close to this, as good as it is.

BTW...if I left the blacks as dark as you did that in that photo not one of the black players on the field would have a face left. If you enjoy 8x10's of people with no faces fine...I prefer my photos of people to actually have a face and that's why I dumped he A100.

It really was dark back there. You might be able to tell that the spotlights were in the arena, and there was very little lighting of the audience at that time. It amazes me that the camera picks up the background as much as it does. I only darkened the curve slightly, and the subject was not harmed in the process.

When you took photos of black players, at least they were in the same light as everyone else.

Another strawman argument? Why would you expect the unlit audience to be clearly visible? Let's set up some arbitrary situations that the A100 is poor at, and, hey, look how poor the A100 is! Even though most cameras would also not do a good job of capturing the unlit audience.

FTR...when shooting action indoors you need shutter speeds of 1/360 to 1/500 and the A100 just can not cut the mustard even with fast lenses. And like I said before, it also could not cut it at ISO 400 to shoot cats with in low light either...

-Sonolta

ISO 400 works great! Your cat photos looked fine -- I didn't see any noise, probably because you downsized them for the web.

I get it, you don't like the A100's ISO 400. I think it's fine. I can make use of ISO 800 in a pinch, and I think ISO 1600 is trouble. What is a problem for me is when ISO 1600 is not good enough. What do I do then? If I'm already at f2.8, I may be out of luck.

In the case of the Medieval Times photos, I forgot my Minolta 50/1.7, which would have been a much better choice (although that lens is a bit soft wide open). Even if ISO 1600 was perfectly noiseless, it still wasn't fast enough.

Clearly, though, faster lenses do matter. My low-light photography definitely improved with the 2.8 lenses.

Regardless, it doesn't bother me that the A100 does not perform as well as cameras costing twice as much. If you want to dump on the A100, you should at least compare it with cameras in its price range.

[pakodominguez]

The A100 had lots of good thing, but noise performance wasn't one of them. At all. I think it is a waste of time defending noise on the A100: Even Sony didn't seams to care too much about it (their FW update didn't changed anything on noise performance) probably because they prefered to put that energy on the A700. I sold mine the day after I got the A700 on the mailbox and I have no regrets (And I think David did a mistake buying a second body, but he does what he wants with his economies...)

The A900 is a good camera but I want it to be a wonderfull camera (not just because the price tag) and we aren't there yet. The problem is that, if you spend time/space on forums denying weak points on cameras (A100 or A900) we won't get the improvement we NEED on their FW, a la A700 V4.

Regards

[David Kilpatrick]

Pako, the A100 held up very well in value. It cost £295 with the lens - we got six months of use from it - it sold for £250 with the lens, and I gave my local camera shop £50 for selling it. Total cost of having 10 megapixels instead of 6 was £95, mainly for the Egyptian trip (overall travel cost and expenses for two came to about £1000). The buyer was an elderly photo enthusiast who has now died, but said he had really enjoyed having the A100 (seems he knew he had a limited time) and got some great photos with it.

I have kept one A100 fitted with the Haoda Fu split screen, it gets no use at all now but it is a useful backup. The only difficult ISO setting is 1600 - everything else can be dealt with by in-camera JPEG NR, or the right raw processing. 1600 never really loses its noisy look unless you decide to lose detail as well.

David

[David Kilpatrick]

Don, the reason I don't have galleries full of great high ISO A100 material is very simple. A) I don't have galleries full of material anyway, 98 per cent of my shots will never be posted on galleries. B) I don't shoot high ISO except to test high ISO because of the excessive interest in relative high ISO performance, or in very few circumstances where high ISO is the only solution. And then I would not use an A100

Just for fun, I checked a year and more of A100 exposures ranging from night time city scenes to low light zoo close-ups, interiors, etc. Never touched 1600, ever, on either camera. Just a very few shots at 800, and everything normally limited to 100-400. Surprisingly high proportion at 100 even in low light. I make much more use of higher ISOs with the A700 and A900.

David

[David Kilpatrick]

If there was more reason to use high ISO, I would. I have enjoyed using the Nikon D3 and D3X to get Christmas fair and market shots in Edinburgh, but last year in London I got better shots with the A700 - and when checking my A100 shots, I found that I had shot the markets two years ago at ISO 100, not even tried to push it, and that was with slow lenses too. Yes, it's great to have a 1/200th shutter speed and not to have to worry about timing your shot to catch a frozen expression or the peak of action at 1/20th, but that's what I learned to do from the very start in photography using cameras from the 1930s in the 1960s.

Tell you what, it's incredible how OLD those cameras seemed - so did cameras from the early 1950s, only ten years before. Do today's teenage newbie photographers see 1970s and 80s film SLRs the same way - like almost antique machines?

David

[Vidgamer]

Why are you still talking? I know what a Medieval Times looks like I have one 45 minutes from my house!

This isn't about Medieval Times -- trying to change the subject? I thought you wanted an example, and I figured it'd be more interesting to post one of the few times I've used ISO 1600. Of course, I knew it wouldn't be good enough for you, but perhaps the others can see what you can salvage at times, when you don't need to worry about uploading to a stock agency.

I guess you were OK with my ISO 400 example. Maybe willing to admit that ISO 400 is ok?

I am not talking about the audience! I am talking about the horse's face/head, the horse's legs, the horse's fancy dress, the bottom of the rider's leg, the horse's chest, and the rider's boots....NO DETAIL WHATSOEVER!

The bottom of the rider's leg? Surely, you're pulling my leg now. It's a black, smooth leather boot that goes way up the calf! Of course there's no detail there.

Look at the riders upper leg and knee, and you can clearly see the armor texture. I can see the horse's nostrils, eyebrow -- maybe your monitor is not calibrated correctly.

The subject -- the interesting bit in the photo -- is lit and shows up well. If all of my ISO 1600 photos turned out this well, maybe I'd use it more often.


As for your strawman arguments, I never said that the a100 was good for low-light sports action, no matter how much you pretend that I did say that. I said that ISO 400 wasn't that bad, and that I had no problem printing at 11x14. You were the one saying that the A100 was only good at ISO 100-200. And you're upset that I am OK with ISO 400 and go into a tirade about cats and ISO 3200 and I don't know where you were going with all of it. I'm really glad for you that you were able to find a low-light sports camera, but still don't understand why you have to rain on my ISO 400 parade.

I think many people would be happy with the ISO 400 performance, at least, and I think you're the odd one out here.

....
If you want me to post strings of hundreds of noisy ugly A100 photos I can....so maybe you had best stop running your mouth ...

[Vidgamer]

If you will stop whining about a100 ISO 400 I will admit that I like this A100 ISO 400 JPG...does that satisfy your A100 fetish?
....

I accept your admission that the A100 can produce fine ISO 400 shots.

[Vidgamer]

My problem with the A100 is that I needed usable ISO 800-3200 and higher and 400 was just too iffy on most all underexposed areas of shots. Underexposures came all too often since ISO selection was limited by the camera's poor noise control. I am glad we are now seeing eye-to-eye on this a900/D3X noise thread...I would start talking A100 WB, colors, metering, and it's stripped down KM5D control set but I will save that for another thread.

-Sonolta

PS...No since making any more posts titled "A100 RULES" on a a900/D3X noise thread...it does not rule anything related to noise, it does not even rule the camera it replaced, the KM5D, in noise control.

I figured that the humor in that would have been obvious. OH well.

It does have better resolution than the 5D, and for many, probably most people, that will be more useful, overall. What might be a topic I'd be more interested in is whether people who buy the A900 are going to avoid high-ISO, or just deal with the noise, as a tradeoff for the increased detail. Given enough pixels, how much of a problem is the noise? I mean, what's the alternative to the A900 -- the D3 at $1000 more? Worth the tradeoffs? This seems very similar to the tradeoff that one would accept in buying an A100.

Obviously, if you have certain critical needs, then the tool you have needs to be able to support that. I think low-light sports is known to be a tough assignment. I don't think we really see things that differently, but we have very different requirements. The few times I've needed high-ISO, I suck it up and deal with the noise. It still rolls over anything I could have done with my (highly regarded for its noise handling!) P&S. I think for many people, the quality is sufficient, even if flawed. (When you don't have to worry about uploading to a stock agency, flaws are not always that striking, even at 8x10, while for my P&S, I had to have a really clean photo to get a good 8x10.)

The worst thing I hate about many cameras is how they deal with noise by applying NR such that you get a real watercolor look to it. The A100 (with fw v4) is just on the edge with its JPEGs; the NR is much better done from RAW in the computer. I think we agree there as well....

[pakodominguez]

Pako, the A100 held up very well in value. It cost £295 with the lens - we got six months of use from it - it sold for £250 with the lens, and I gave my local camera shop £50 for selling it. Total cost of having 10 megapixels instead of 6 was £95, mainly for the Egyptian trip (overall travel cost and expenses for two came to about £1000). The buyer was an elderly photo enthusiast who has now died, but said he had really enjoyed having the A100 (seems he knew he had a limited time) and got some great photos with it.

I have kept one A100 fitted with the Haoda Fu split screen, it gets no use at all now but it is a useful backup. The only difficult ISO setting is 1600 - everything else can be dealt with by in-camera JPEG NR, or the right raw processing. 1600 never really loses its noisy look unless you decide to lose detail as well.

David

David,

If I recall correctly, you bought the second A100 because you like that camera so much you want another body before it got discontinued/unavailable. I Thing the A700 was already in the market -but probably not in the EU, I got mine right before my trip to Spain in October 2007 (I read the manual in the plane!) and even if I agree with you that the A100 @100 ASA is one of the sharpest camera (I believe the A350 might be better, but I havent try that camera. What do you think?) I wasn't a great camera. PopPhot name it the camera of the year not because it performance, but because it's meaning for the market: Sony is here, taking the place the KM left after (or even before) they abdicated, and they will invest a lot of money on R&D.

I think the 7D is a cemra to keep (as you do for your studio work) but not the A100. The A100 was what we got at that time and we had to deal with it. I got mine because a) I wanted to give som rest to the 7D; b) I wanted to learn Sony's new approach (Ergonomy, DRO, etc); and c) I got it for cheap and I sold it one year after for more money that I spent on it. IMHO, selling your first A100 (and not buying the second one) would be a good deal. But if you didn't had an A700 handy at that time and you needed a second body...

If there is no solution, you already have the solution!

Regards

[pakodominguez]

I may pick one up for a couple hundred bucks one day...but it will only be used outdoors when I want to carry a small, high resolution, good light camera. It is a very good camera in that regard.

Don,
You already said that about the Dimage A2.

[David Kilpatrick]

If I recall correctly, you bought the second A100 because you like that camera so much you want another body before it got discontinued/unavailable. I Thing the A700 was already in the market -but probably not in the EU, I got mine right before my trip to Spain in October 2007 (I read the manual in the plane!) and even if I agree with you that the A100 @100 ASA is one of the sharpest camera (I believe the A350 might be better, but I havent try that camera. What do you think?

In summer 2007 the price of the A100 fell sharply and body only deals were available, to the point where we knew we could sell the KM5D+18-70 (unused, like the 18-70mm which came with the original A100) and pay almost nothing to switch. It was at least a month before the D700 launch. I had just finishing processing our shots from Provence, and the difference between the 5D and A100 had been apparent in those.

What is a bit extreme is what happened next - the A200, A350, A900 all within this year. Checking the A100 files they are indeed amongst the sharpest overall, the contrast and colour have more life than the A350 even though that does exceed the resolution. I need to use the A350 more.

David

[pakodominguez]

Not all will be invested in A-Mount system but I will come away with a new 70-200 2.8 (Siggy or Tammy),

http://www.slrgear.com/reviews/showprod ... 090/cat/23
but you probably already saw it. I think the Tamron is a little better than the Minolta/Sony. I have the impression that the Sony isn't as sharp at the edges, the Tammy focus closer and bokeh is better, specially for close ups. I think I'll have more time this weekend, in order to "inspect" the pics I took with both lenses a couple of weeks ago.

Then for me a lensbaby is next...

The Composer is the way to go. I'll try to get one soon next year -I'm waiting for a wide angle adapter (0.45 if I recall correctly) they announced at the Photo Plus Expo.

I want the bridge camera for LV and the deep DOF but I have not yet ruled out an A300 purchase, but that would stretch my budget very thin and I would not getting the additional DOF I am looking for. I was thinking of putting my 28-75D up on ebay as well but I think I will keep it a while longer. I only want to reinvest about $1500 for now so something may not actually make it into my bag as soon as I would like.

I'm thinking on a A350 (or equivalent) but not before I get the A900!
If you think you will go FF, keep the 28~75D

Regards