All my lenses just doubled in length ....

Started 5 months ago | Discussion thread
Rehabdoc
Contributing MemberPosts: 587
Like?
Re: Old tech
In reply to franzel, 5 months ago

franzel wrote:

Cropping and upsampling, as said above, is what this is .

Those familiar with upsampling/interpolation will recognize it as the worst possible way to edit a file .

RIP software does a decent job with upsampling, if it's just for print, but even Photoshop ain't very good at it, though it's come a long way .

Digital Zoom is a feature of P&S cameras, where IQ doesn't matter, and I find it a bit embarrasing for Sony to have that nonsense on the Nexes . Adding upsampling is even worse, like they expect everyone to be utterly incompetent in digital photography and not know what it does to IQ .

Just to play devil's advocate, from a workflow and creativity standpoint, having your camera allow you to operate in LIVE VIEW as a 60mm instead of a 30mm equivalent, so you can choose focus points, frame & compose your shots as 60mm shots, is quite different from framing and composing in a wider FOV at 30mm, then digitally cropping later. Especially in choosing what will be in focus and what will be out of focus in the shot, etc.

Also, I actually downsample more than 90% of my JPEGs that I shoot with my NEX 7 from 24MP to 6MP. I only keep 10% of my shots or less at 24MP.

-

Lastly, from a technical standpoint, I agree that clear image zoom is categorically worse than cropping a RAW and doing OPTIMAL upscaling later, but I would guess that the algorithms they are using will produce a better image than taking a full scale OOC JPG, then digitally cropping it down, then upsampling.

The sensor itself is not like a foveon, with each individual element measuring RG&B, It's a Bayer pattern, and I suspect that the algorithm for producing your JPG from that NEX 6 RAW sensor data is optimized for a 16MP JPG.

Clear image zoom is the equivalent of taking the RAW data from the center 1/4 of the original sensor... then optimizing it for a JPG 4x the original resolution.

I know that's not clearly worded:

What I'm saying is that the roughly 16 million sensor Bayer pattern RAW data is normally converted to a 16MP OOC JPG. I'm saying that IF the RAW data had instead been converted to a 64MP OOC JPG, it might retain a little more information than the 16MP OOC JPG.

What it looks like they are claiming to do with clear image zoom is processing the RAW data AS IF the resolution of the JPG they're producing were 4x standard. They are essentially giving you the center 16 MP of what the 64MP OOC JPG would have been, which is a little bit better than what you get when you crop a 16MP JPG and upsample it (and by definition, upsampling can't produce new infromation). Clear image zoom is probably not a LOT better than just cropping a JPG, but maybe a little better.

Edited 5 months ago by Rehabdoc
Reply   Reply with quote   Complain
Post (hide subjects)Posted by
Keyboard shortcuts:
FForum PPrevious NNext WNext unread UUpvote SSubscribe RReply QQuote BBookmark post MMy threads
Color scheme? Blue / Yellow