R1 Advice

I bought this camera from Sony and posted an evaluation on Epinions. With the passage of time I have revised somewhat my first impressions. A quick summary:

1. On balance great lens, sharp, distrotion free at almost all focal lengths. I miss the closer macro setting on my W-1 Sony, but not the softness of the lens. With almost 11 megapixels you can crop.

2. Internal firmware, okay but I still play with most images in Photoshop or PhotoElements 4.0. Out door shots that are well lit are almost perfect. Very bright highlights in an otherwise balanced ligting situation tend to wash out. There is a menu setting that warns you when this is about to happen so you can underexpose the photo a bit.

3. I am an occasional photographer, it goes in spurts. I have to take the manual with me on trips as I forget the meaning of certain icons, and how to do practical things, like adjust exposure in program mode. white balance, depth of field etc. Need to get out of Auto more often.

4. This is a big heavy camera. I like it, easy to steady, nicely balanced even with external flash. I really like the manual zoom control on the lens'

5. On balance no second thoughts. I was tired of being a mule (Canon AE-1 with a fabulous assortment of expenses lens')

I don't know if anyone answered this for you or not but both a MS and a CF card can be loaded into the camera at the same time and there is a small switch on the bottom right side back that lets you switch from one to the other if you like. Bob.

--Did I hear landscapes?



ISO 800 (handheld)



ISO 800 (handheld)













Sorry, no flowers... But I have Coffee Mugs!



Not trying to influence your decision, or anything...

Take care...

Russ



By Grace, Alone...

BobWil818 said:

How many shots can you get on a 2 gig card in raw?

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I get around 75 on my 2GB MS.

I have started shooting in the RAW mode now that I have a 2GB and 1GB card to fill up. That's good for just over 100 shots between the two of them. I'm on travel right now, and I've been shooting about 25% of my shots in RAW. Things that I want to play with later or possible print, I shoot in RAW. Taking pictures of simple things or pictures I take to reference locations, I don't bother wasting the space with the RAW format. I like how this camera remembers which menu item you used last. It makes it very quick to switch between the two for shots.

That was rude indeed.

If you are happy with your R1 all the better. So you demands are less than mine. Just bear in mind that if someone askes advise that different people will give different advise based on their own sense of quality. I am in the group that would spend more money in case of wide angle photography and landscapes and also get much better results with other tools in this specific area. I have found many on this forum agree with me. My photos are published now and then in magazines and I found the R1 didn't perform well enough compared to the competition at wide angle. Not a big surprise of course, but it would have been great if it had at such a price. No such luck though.

Especially barrel distortion corrections do affect the wide angle reach considarably, especially if you have verticals up close as in interior photography. But really, I am trying to get too much out of the R1 and maybe my advise goes a little beyond for what the camera is meant for. For what it does well it does very well and would satisfy any consumer and enthousiastic amateur photographer.

My advise:
R1 for portaits and all round photography under good lighting conditions

Wide angle at 24eq.

High ISO DSLR with prime 24mm 1.4 or 2.8 for concerts and low light action photography.
DSLR with 10-22 or prime 24 for landscapes and architecture.

http://homepage.mac.com/frv/New%20Album/

see for yourself the distortion the R1 will give you. These are just some photos I took at a place under construction so the photos themselves are not great. Still, on many of the photos you see what barrel distortion really means. 0,8% is considerable and about A prime at 24 mm will give you almost none, at least nothing that needs correction. Corrected the R1's reach goes back to about 26-28 mm depending on how close your bended verticals are. The futher away in the distance the less deformed they are.

The reason I was a little dissappointed with the R1 is that I was also considering the Canon 350D wih with a 10-22 lens. Total costs for that would have been about 1200 euro's. The 10-22 would have given me even more wide reach and at 24mm distortion is close to none. Thats the advantage of a dedicated wide angle lens. So for all that are looking at the R1 for wide angle photography I would advise to take a close look at these issues and at least give the competition are serious look as well, if you publish your photos now and then you will most certainly need to spend more money to keep the editors happy.

You manually switch between the two cards, but it is a very nice hardware switch on the back of the R1, not some menu setting.

You can put around 72 raw shots on a 2Gb card, unless you change the accompanying jpeg to less than 10MP (e.g. 1MP), that will gain you around 3Mb/shot. So 72x3Mb = 216Mb, which should give you around 10 extra shots.

--
oVan - http://ovan.be/

frobertv said:

http://homepage.mac.com/frv/New%20Album/

see for yourself the distortion the R1 will give you. These are
just some photos I took at a place under construction so the photos
themselves are not great.

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Yes, I remember seeing these when you first posted a link to them. It's an interesting building.

frobertv said:

Still, on many of the photos you see what
barrel distortion really means. 0,8% is considerable and about

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This is where we differ. My take is that the barrel distortion is trivial! You need to experience a bad zoom lens! Like the Nikkor 18-200, which got really good reviews...and that lens costs as much as the whole R1 camera!

What I see in the pictures is mostly perspective distortion, caused by shooting up and down, instead of orienting the camera level. This is NOT a fault of the camera or lens. It might be a problem with the photographer? But my take is that these pix are excellent.

frobertv said:

A prime at 24 mm will give you almost none, at least nothing that
needs correction.

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Yes, but it has a fixed LF. Comparing it to a zoom is silly. But if you expect it to "fix" the perspective errors... ;-)

frobertv said:

Corrected the R1's reach goes back to about 26-28
mm depending on how close your bended verticals are. The futher
away in the distance the less deformed they are.

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Not sure how you determine the "reach" after you run PTlens, or equivalent. My take is that the sides of the rectangle do not change at all when I run it...only the corners "move". I would say that the "reach" does not change. I also disagree about your last sentence. Barrel distortion is not materially affected by the distance to the subject.

If you are, however, correcting perspective, then the change to the "reach" is substantial!

frobertv said:

The reason I was a little dissappointed with the R1 is that I was
also considering the Canon 350D wih with a 10-22 lens.

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You are comparing a 2.2X zoom to a 5X zoom. And comparing an F:3.5 to an F:2.8. And comparing a $700 lens with a $700 camera and lens.

frobertv said:

Total costs
for that would have been about 1200 euro's. The 10-22 would have
given me even more wide reach and at 24mm distortion is close to
none.

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You are comparing one zoom lens at mid range to another at an extreme. All lenses sorta have better control of abberations in the middle.

frobertv said:

Thats the advantage of a dedicated wide angle lens. So for
all that are looking at the R1 for wide angle photography I would
advise to take a close look at these issues and at least give the
competition are serious look as well, if you publish your photos
now and then you will most certainly need to spend more money to
keep the editors happy.

Click to expand...

This is bad advice. The R1 takes wonderful WA shots. There is nothing at the R1 price point that is comparable. WA is one of the stroing suits of the R1...you somehow turned it into a "problem".

--
Charlie Davis
Nikon 5700 & Sony R1
CATS #25
PAS Scribe @ http://www.here-ugo.com/PAS_List.htm
HomePage: http://www.1derful.info
'I brake for pixels...'

--Chuxter,

I agree with you. Persective distortion will happen regardless of how much you spent on the lens.

DXO accurately corrects WA distortion on my R1 images, therefore, there is no problem.

Notice the "perspective distortion", yet no lens distortion.



frobertv has good points. If you can spend enough, you'll get better quality.

However, SONY does provide a wide angle converter that extends the R1's focal length to 19mm, so you wouldn't necessarily need to go elsewhere for extreme wide angle photography. But hey, if fisheye images are your game, then by all means, look elsewhere.

Russ



By Grace, Alone...

oVan said:

You can put around 72 raw shots on a 2Gb card, unless you change
the accompanying jpeg to less than 10MP (e.g. 1MP), that will gain
you around 3Mb/shot. So 72x3Mb = 216Mb, which should give you
around 10 extra shots.

Click to expand...

Any idea why they mandate a jpeg 'safety' for each RAW image? It would seem to me that being able to shut that option off would be an advantage if you were happy with just shooting RAW.

Bill Spohn said:

Any idea why they mandate a jpeg 'safety' for each RAW image? It
would seem to me that being able to shut that option off would be
an advantage if you were happy with just shooting RAW.

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It's not a safety, it's there to support in-camera viewing, display to video output and other feaures, like enlargement for focus check, histogram review, etc. The camera cannot act as a real-time RAW converter for these functions.

The R1 uses the current JPEG settings to produce the companion JPEG image file when saving RAW format, so you can minimize how much space it takes up on storage cards by setting the JPEG parameters to minimum size JPEG images and maximum compression. That way the JPEG companion files are 500K or less, trivial compared to the 21.5Mbyte RAW file.

My script to transfer files from card media to my computer copies all files than files all the JPEGs into a subdirectory. They're occasionally all I need for party snaps. ;-)

Godfrey

Obviously pointing the camera up or down gives you perspective in a vertical sense showing converging verticals. For architecture you usually level your camera to have straight verticals so thats a more or less practical issue and has nothing to do with lens quality. No need to stress that, I though people here knew that, no problem posters here though that was my problem, I just assumed this was common knowledge.

The fact is that barrel distortion does actually reduce the angle of view a little and its also not really the best way to go if you can get lenses that are performing better. With the R1 you can pp your picts and get away with it as well but not as good and basically you should pp all your files, maybe in some sort of batch routine, I rather have a lens that is better. Any zoom that goes from wide to tele will distort and so there is the limit of a all round zoom cameras compared to a dedicated wide angle camera. I even use dedicated wide angle TC's to get the best wide angle shots. I have a 80XL, 72XL and a 58XL on 4x5 that are totally distortion free and shots made with those completely blow away any R1 pict, corrected or not. So when I borrowed a Canon 350D with a 10-22 I was actually surprised hwow good and undistorted the picts where straight out of the camera. As a digital camara I don't see the need of mirrors flapping around and really like the life preview on the lcd viewer I decided to get a R1 instead thinking the 24mm eq at its widest would suit me equally well. The R1 did not and I found it an avarage performer, in all other aspects I feel the R1 is truly great. I have found on the web numerous other photographers who have the same experience I have.

As far as object that are closer or not and the amount of distortion you get. Its true that the distance itself is not the measure, its the length of the lines closest to edge of the frame. Usually straight lines close to the edge off the frame are frome doorways or windowframes, the closer they are the more chance you have they run from edge to edge and showing bended or distorted lines as for instance a calm sea horizon would.

well, just hope to give some advise. I am really a fan of wide angle photography and the R1 just doesn't deliver for me at that point. Even without any need for correction I find at its widest the picts are a little soft and get sharper picts taken with a good prime on a dslr. For all my holiday photos I think the R1 is a overkill and I just walk around with a Pana fx01. These I took in China with an older Pana compact camera.

http://www.homepage.mac.com/frv/China you can click on the second page with pics at the top.

I always have a lot of fun looking at people who carry R1's or DSLR's on there holidays and store Gb of picts and then see my simple 3Mp photos and wonder what I used to take them......

--frobertv,

Your advice is greatly appreciated...

Russ



By Grace, Alone...

How do you copy the jpg files to a different folder automatically.

I really need that function.

Cheers.

russell2006 said:

How do you copy the jpg files to a different folder automatically.

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I have an AppleScript which takes source directory, creates a new folder in my download area with the current date as name, copies all the files from the card to that location, then creates a subdirectory named "JPEG" and moves the .JPG files there. I wrote it myself, took about a half hour or so. I'm a little leery of handing it out as it's not what I'd consider finish quality nor has it been tested on anything other than my primary desktop system, but it works fine for my uses.

Godfrey

Very good lens. You can set it to manual focus in low light and it works fine without flash up to 800Iso if you use RAW and set the sarpening to low. Download Raw Shooter essentials for free from Pixmantec. It improves everything very easily and you can control in RAW only sharpness done to nothing if you like. And you can very all noise reduction to suit you. Esy to use manual included.The waist-level screen is a huge advantage, compared to DSLRs and the viewfinder is very good with adjustable dioptre for wonky eyes like mine. The results at low ISOs match expensive machines and the ergonomics, while not perfect at waist-level are fine if you adjust the shoulder strap to match your hangrip on the shutter. In good light point and shoot is perfect. Check the "US" picture on Flikr. My ID is harrappeter. It was a single very quick grab shot. RAW.
--
narayana

Really interesting thread.

I'm an amateur with some talent, enjoy taking lots of landscape and close-up nature shots, some sports photography. Since I started shooting I used Olympus manual SLRs, and shlepped a small variety of lenses.

In shopping for a digital camera, I was not immediately attracted to a dSLR as I did not already have the requisite lenses. I also lacked the resources to spend past $1k. I also liked shooting with a wide angle lens, and was quite discouraged by the 1.6 step-up.

Enter the R1. For me it is perfect, and I keep learning more and more how to use it. I've had it since mid-December, can't tell you how many photos I've taken cuz it's digital. (why bother counting when you're not paying for film developing?)

The lens range is perfect. I think the folks talking about the issues for the widest angles have larger budgets than mine--yes there are wide angle lenses that are better, they also cost more and unless you have a full-frame sensor dSLR (even more $$), they're not as wide as they're supposed to be.

If you want to zoom in and are upset about the limits to higher end--just zoom and crop on the computer. You have a 10mp file, more than bg enough to do what you want--and the lens allows plenty of light.

Sports photography is trickier, yes, but possible. You just need to play around. If you're going to drop $2-3k on camera and lenses, than you can do better. But don't take on airs that a $1k camera is inferior cuz that's kind of silly.

The camera is also much more comfortable ergonomically than dSLR's in that price range. The digital rebel was designed for my 5'1" wife, not for me.

The fact that you don't have to change lenses means that you never expose the sensor to the open air -- no dust issues, no dirt, no nothing. I can't wait to go backpacking with it. I can't imagine what would happen if you tried to change a dSLR lens in the rain after not camping for three days.

One last point on the voice recorder. As a digital newbie, I think it's neat that I flash the mouse cursor over the raw file on my computer and I get a readout of the camera settings I used in taking the shot. Very useful.

This is not a tool for point-n-shoot folks or the wealthier set. It's certainly a tool for me though!

Godfrey said:

The R1 uses the current JPEG settings to produce the companion JPEG
image file when saving RAW format, so you can minimize how much
space it takes up on storage cards by setting the JPEG parameters
to minimum size JPEG images and maximum compression. That way the
JPEG companion files are 500K or less, trivial compared to the
21.5Mbyte RAW file.

Click to expand...

Correct me if this is wrong, but when you set the JPEG file size so it saves a 1 MB file every time you take a RAW image, doesn't that also dictate the same size of JPEG if you switch to taking JPEGS?

IN other words if you wanted to take 10 MB JPEGS, you'd have to go back into the menus and reset size - you can't set one size (large) for when you are shooting JPEGs and another size (small - 1 MB) for JPEGS saved when shooting in RAW?

Bill Spohn said:

Correct me if this is wrong, but when you set the JPEG file size so
it saves a 1 MB file every time you take a RAW image, doesn't that
also dictate the same size of JPEG if you switch to taking JPEGS?

IN other words if you wanted to take 10 MB JPEGS, you'd have to go
back into the menus and reset size - you can't set one size (large)
for when you are shooting JPEGs and another size (small - 1 MB) for
JPEGS saved when shooting in RAW?

Click to expand...

That is correct. If you swap back and forth between RAW and JPEG capture a lot, you need to reset the JPEG size to get the full resolution sizing. However, this is done with one press of the menu button and three taps on the joystick lever ... it's pretty convenient. It's not like you have to dive down several layers into the menu system ... image resolution is one of the top level settings.

However: once you start working with RAW format files and see the capabilities it provides, in general my experience is that you stop using JPEG format capture almost entirely.

Godfrey