Why are there so many entry level cameras?

[bakubo]

I should have got an A700..but at the time I was not laying out for a camera with NR on raw!

The Pentax K7 also does NR on raw and it can't be turned off (only low, medium, high settings). See the dxomark site for the info. I have never seen any of the test sites make a big deal out of it. Weird, since it was a big deal with the A700. I looked at the Pentax forums and didn't see any uproar about it. That was surprising. By the way, the K7 above ISO 1000 or so is worse than the A700.

[WaltKnapp]

I should have got an A700..but at the time I was not laying out for a camera with NR on raw!

The Pentax K7 also does NR on raw and it can't be turned off (only low, medium, high settings). See the dxomark site for the info. I have never seen any of the test sites make a big deal out of it. Weird, since it was a big deal with the A700. I looked at the Pentax forums and didn't see any uproar about it. That was surprising. By the way, the K7 above ISO 1000 or so is worse than the A700.

Virtually all DSLRs do some form of NR on raw. For whatever reason the a700 was singled out, but one of the things that brought out was that it was not alone. People have grown up a bit since then.

Walt

[bfitzgerald]

The A700 was singled out as it's NR was pretty huge and impossible to miss. I'll again repeat whilst other companies have "tinkered" with raw not all do apply NR on it..and those that do it's nowhere near as obvious or ultimately destructive.

The "blowtorch and candle wax" A700 NR high ISO images were pretty shocking to say the least..melted in colour noise as well only made things worse. I think people have "woken up a bit" and even more so now Adobe seem to have really got a grip on noise and noise reduction. I'd say there are more than a few A700 users crying into their keyboard as they have pre applied NR to images that cannot get anywhere near the quality of LR3 for example, they're stuck with Sony's mistake..well at least until they fixed it.

That's why there was such a big deal about it software gets better..no point having raw if you mess about with NR on the raw files.
If you never shoot low light or high ISO it would never have bothered you, I do so it did! I believe that mistake probably cost Sony significant sales as well. That's when the alarm bells started to ring..albeit in a minor way.

[bakubo]

Here is the dxomark Can RAW images be already somewhat cooked? article:

http://dxomark.com/index.php/eng/Insigh ... cooked-RAW

[bfitzgerald]

I've read that before. Funny how they mention Sony specifically!
More to the point the actual NR used was ineffective and crude, it might have had a point were it good and impressive!

[Greg Beetham]

Who can forget the huge kerfuffel when Don (Sonolta) got involved with the topic over at dpr, and all the A700 protectors came out to challenge his views, and Barry weighed in on Don's side basically, eventually they all had too admit that A700 RAW Ver. 1 was cooking the high ISO so badly it was creating all sorts of watercolour artifacts, it was a shocker basically, made one wonder how Sony would ever think no one would notice. Especially when the D300 came out a bit later with a very similar sensor supplied (so the story goes) by Sony for Nikon's requirements/specs. and didn't have the problem.
Greg

ps. I think Don got himself banned at dpr after some of the more heated exchanges, if I remember correctly.

[bfitzgerald]

Reminds me of the NEX discussions of late, death to all who dare to speak out!
It was a matter of principle and it shocked me that folks would actually be against user choice about NR. Sony still have not de-linked NR for high ISO from raw..so I leave it "off" permanently on the A200.
I think it was an over reaction to the A100 "noise" they just decided to try to smash it at the raw level, and unfortunately the jpegs have never recovered since then either.

I'm sure there is some tinkering on the A850/900 500/550 but not anywhere near as obvious.

Don was right on that one, but I have a good memory and he suddenly was a lot less vocal about it when he got an A700.

[Greg Beetham]

I think it might have been the firmware version, or some update that was released..eventually, that appeased Don and others enough, it didn't completely fix the problem at the time but I'm fairly sure it fixed it enough so you could work with it, it wasn't until a long time after that that a nearly complete fix was available, when Sony released Ver.4 I think, my A700 still has ver.3 point something or other, that's the way it came new from B&H only a couple of months before the model was no longer listed there. I haven't bothered to install Ver.4 as I rarely venture above ISO800 or 1600 in a pinch.
Greg

[agorabasta]

Very funny talk I see here!

Just to put the matters as clear as can be - try v1 a700 raw files with some modern converter. No matter if it's Lr3 or a recent version of DCRAW, those v1 raws look quite acceptable at ISO3200, and at ISO6400 you get them virtually noise-free but somewhat mushy at low contrast detail. But still OK for A4 print even at ISO6400. (You may get those v1 NR 'normal' samples at IR.)

Now what happened later - the later firmwares first did some changes to basic curve thus changing the quantization of the raw data in the shadows vs the midtones vs highlights (the v1 even required different curves between 3200 and 6400) which means that their ADCs were very advanced and highly controllable, then with the later firmwares they tried to cut down the filtering strength, killing the filtering in the green channel first, until with the v4 they finally greatly reduced the NR processing to raw in general. Still the momentum in development was lost; despite having the hardware capabilities well ahead of its time, the a700 got clubbed by poor unrefined firmware design.

But the funny thing is that there's another cam that simply used the same approach as seen in the a700 v1, yet got it carefully attuned for optimal results.
That cam is the D700. The original D3 has it all the same, though at far less aggressive levels.

[WaltKnapp]

The "blowtorch and candle wax" A700 NR high ISO images were pretty shocking to say the least..melted in colour noise as well only made things worse. I think people have "woken up a bit" and even more so now Adobe seem to have really got a grip on noise and noise reduction. I'd say there are more than a few A700 users crying into their keyboard as they have pre applied NR to images that cannot get anywhere near the quality of LR3 for example, they're stuck with Sony's mistake..well at least until they fixed it.

And that was found to go away when one went away from Adobe software and used better written software. Before v4 was put in the a700.

The same problem existed to a lessor degree using Adobe software with Canon Raw, but of course Adobe responded much faster there. I first found out what the problem was by reading the detailed analysis that was to be found in the Canon forums, where people are a bit more expert.

Walt

[bfitzgerald]

Adobe were most def guilty of messing about with NR and worse NR that you could not turn off. Whilst it took them a while they have responded and I know a fair few who were not happy with what they were doing NR wise in ACR/LR etc. Now we have a choice so that's just great, and it's nice to see a company respond to the needs of users. I hope Toru is reading that last line very slowly

[Greg Beetham]

I got the impression at the time that you couldn't fix the water colour smudgy stuff even with the RAW converter software that came with the camera from Sony, so their software must have been nearly as bad as Adobe's was.
Greg

[Mark K]

Who can forget the huge kerfuffel when Don (Sonolta) got involved with the topic over at dpr, and all the A700 protectors came out to challenge his views, and Barry weighed in on Don's side basically, eventually they all had too admit that A700 RAW Ver. 1 was cooking the high ISO so badly it was creating all sorts of watercolour artifacts, it was a shocker basically, made one wonder how Sony would ever think no one would notice. Especially when the D300 came out a bit later with a very similar sensor supplied (so the story goes) by Sony for Nikon's requirements/specs. and didn't have the problem.
Greg

ps. I think Don got himself banned at dpr after some of the more heated exchanges, if I remember correctly.

No matter how much I love my A700, the image quality from the two cameras, some two month age difference is completely different. I still noticed a lot of noise, post processing artifacts and less clarity from an A700 image to a D300 image.

[Mark K]

With the release of A55/A33, I feel much better

[bfitzgerald]

The A55 is priced as a mid level body (£750 odd), and the A33 is about £100 cheaper which either makes it an upper entry level body or a mid price depending on how you look at things. I'd call below £500 entry level myself.
As far as budget/entry level is concerned you've go the A290/A390, and both are very dated and low spec in the market though the only point to make is 2 instead of just one. Maybe Sony will do an A22 EVF model but I'd expect a few things to be chopped out, EVF size and lower res LCD screen etc.