Are you completely incapable of basic reading comprehension Barry?
Because you certainly didn't understand a thing I said and yet you
still ask for something I said was not possible.
Ok, perhaps it should not get personal, but you seem to like it to
be. My very point is that they have done things differently than
Canon, and you respond by asking to be shown the same result.
Different approach, different result. We know you do not like clean
ISO images, there is nothing wrong with that. You like to pixel peep
while many like to print, share, and otherwise use images for other
purposes. Again, nothing wrong with that. THAT WAS MY POINT. Is
the A700 image flawless, no. Is Canon able to make a flawless image,
no. Is my friend's digital back on his Hassy flawless, no where near
it looking at the pixel level we do here. Does that mean any of
those cameras is unusable? NO.
Again, all CMOS sensors that are intended for higher image quality
devices use NR on the chip. Nobody has ever allowed you to turn it
off because it is hard wired to the chip. It is slightly strange
that you cannot turn off the Sony software NR on high ISO for jpegs,
but the software NR has nothing to do with RAW anyway. If you cannot
take my word for it that Canon also uses NR, here's the old review of
the Canon D30 (not the 30D mind) where IR felt the need to explain
why they were using CMOS;
http://www.imaging-resource.com/PRODS/D30/D30A4.HTM
Of particular interest, notice the following:
"Why hasn't CMOS taken over at the high end? Well, up until now,
image quality has not been on a par with CCD… CMOS sensors, with
their many amplifiers at each pixel, suffer from so-called "fixed
pattern noise". The amplifiers aren't all equal, and this creates a
noise pattern across the image. In the D30's CMOS sensor, Canon has
tackled this by first taking the image off the CMOS sensor in 10
milliseconds, and then reading just the fixed-pattern noise from the
sensor in the following 10 milliseconds. Subtract the second image
from the first, and you neatly remove the noise."
As David K said, Canon reads out the bottom end of the low bits where
most noise is located, and subtracts those bits out of the data at
the chip level. That is why they have always been able to produce
such clean high ISO images, and I have always felt there was a little
shadow detail missing as well, but that is for my taste. Sony on the
other hand, has implemented a different approach to attempt to keep
some of the low end detail, as can be seen with the DRO+ samples and
other's PP adjustments including David K's excellent article. With
the Canon approach, those samples would not be possible, or at least
not nearly so powerful. They are different, the results are
corrispondingly different, and to each there own. I cannot show you
Barry, the same result from DIFFERENT processes, but if I can get my
hands on a 40D soon, I will attempt to show you how different
approaches produce different results. The only thing I can assure
you is the same between them is that neither the Sony nor Canon CMOS
based cameras can turn off the built in chip functions, be it NR, A/D
conversion, or anythign else. In the interum, please relax and be
glad there are choices out there since it would be a dull world if we
all prefered the samethings all the time!
