A550 raw noise vs A850 vs Canon 7D

GaryW · Dec 5, 2009

photonut2008 said:
agorabasta said:

photonut2008 said:

Haha:

Same EV, but one is taken at ISO 100 and the other at ISO 400. No noise?

Click to expand...

What is the noise here?

Click to expand...

Plenty of noise there, in both of them. Not that I would consider it objectionable in a print or reasonably sized for the web.

photonut2008 said:

The patterns are absolutely identical in those 'images'.

Click to expand...

Well, then so much for your hypothesis that ISO 100 would generate a "noise-free" file when underexposed by two stops, since it mostly has the same level of noise as the ISO 400 shot that was exposed at the same EV.

But if it was random noise, why do the patterns look the same? I clipped the right-hand photo, pasted it as a layer on top of the left side, and selected "difference" and when I got them lined up, it went black (meaning they were almost the same). I had to zoom in to over 1000% to see that there was a very subtle difference. I would expect true noise to stick out like a speckled mess, and each photo to generate a different set of random variation in the noise. What did I do wrong?

As for ISO 400, if you underexpose ISO 100 by two stops, shouldn't it look similar to ISO 400 exposed properly?

photonut2008 said:
photonut2008 said:

You're simply pathetic...

Click to expand...

I don't think that furthers the conversation.

photonut2008 said:
What is pathetic is someone who thinks they are getting optimum data for their photography by pixel peeping, and who evaluates cameras based on ISO 3200 shots taken by a third party over which said person has no control of the conditions under which those sample images were taken.
--
Anthony Beach

--
Gary W.

liquid stereo · Dec 5, 2009

such foolishness in public.

photonut2008 · Dec 5, 2009

Phixel said:
Images on good monitors just look better than prints.

Whatever floats your boat, I get more sustained enjoyment from a print on my wall than an image on my computer's monitor.
--
Anthony Beach

Phixel · Dec 5, 2009

photonut2008 said:
Phixel said:

Images on good monitors just look better than prints.

Click to expand...

Whatever floats your boat, I get more sustained enjoyment from a print on my wall than an image on my computer's monitor.
--
Anthony Beach

Right. That is why you spend so much time staring at your computer monitor and posting on this forum! And I am sure you only read the articles on the internet and never look at any pictures !

-Phil

Tuputam · Dec 5, 2009

GaryW

GaryW said:
Agorabasta has posted enough in the past to show that he knows his stuff too

That maybe true in the past, but he lost a lot of credibility in this thread. I will take Canon 7D over A700 any day, despite the imaginary better A700 RAW file at ISO 3200. The thread is silly.

photonut2008 · Dec 5, 2009

Phixel said:
photonut2008 said:

Whatever floats your boat, I get more sustained enjoyment from a print on my wall than an image on my computer's monitor.

Click to expand...

Right. That is why you spend so much time staring at your computer monitor and posting on this forum!

One has nothing to do with the other. I did not say I spend hours and hours staring at the prints on my walls, or that I never view images on my computer. I merely said I enjoy my prints on my walls more than my images on my computer. Any photo I have on my computer's hard drive and at my online gallery that really catches my imagination, ends up as a print that spends time on one of my walls.

Phixel said:
And I am sure you only read the articles on the internet and never look at any pictures !

I read articles on the Internet, but (FWIW) I mostly avoid your posts and threads. I also read books on photography. Yes, I also look at people's photos at various websites.

That said, I find my 22" monitor too limiting for many of my photos. That's why I bought the A850, so I could make even bigger prints that are rich in detail and viewed with equal satisfaction from across the room and up close. Finally, when I go to other people's homes I do not see the photos on their computers, I see the photos on their walls.
--
Anthony Beach

agorabasta · Dec 6, 2009

Tuputam said:
I will take Canon 7D over A700 any day, despite the imaginary better A700 RAW file at ISO 3200. The thread is silly.

If the matter were noise only, many would switch. The problem with Canon has always been with their colour response. Badly unnatural reds, wrong lifeless skin tones, whitish glowing skies... Even though they've improved a lot with 7D, it still needs tons of individual hand-tuning per image to get it acceptable, and the deeper reds/purples are still wrong.

But if you don't care of those subtleties, then Canon is the way to go.

(And this thread really looks mostly silly due to posts like yours and from another 'photonut' around here, the two who have no eye to see and no brain to understand.)

mike_2008 · Dec 6, 2009

Seriously, your arrogant point of view (on the lines of if you don't understand you're stupid) does not fit well with the lack of precision in your writing style. You can't write a series of subjective unsubstantiated claims without justifying them. And this use of p&s as if you're talking about it as a useful tool when in reailty most people would see it as a pejorative term is completely disingenuous.

If you're willing to spend all this time on the forum try communicating more clearly and less subjectively.

agorabasta said:
(And this thread really looks mostly silly due to posts like yours and from another 'photonut' around here, the two who have no eye to see and no brain to understand.)

--
http://mike2008.smugmug.com

Tuputam · Dec 6, 2009

agorabasta

agorabasta said:
(And this thread really looks mostly silly due to posts like yours and from another 'photonut' around here, the two who have no eye to see and no brain to understand.)

No, the thread is silly because the only purpose of this thread was to take a dig at cameras that you don't own. You did that repeatedly (in other threads too) by taking a dig at A550 because you are the owner of the sibling, A500. You needed to justify that you made a better purchase. That was the point of this thread. You called A550 a nice p&s DSLR, which was your attempt at mocking the camera. As for eyes to see and brains to understand, don't be an idiot. Ask most A900/A850 owners, and they will claim what they see is a much better camera than A700 (resolution, colors, dynamic range) . Ask Canon owners and they will claim they see better colors on Canon than on Sony. Color .. pffft. There is a lot of subjective opinion here too. You are behaving like an outright idiot. You dismissed dxomark because they rate A850 way over A700. Obviously they don’t have brains to understand as you do (sarcasm).

photonut2008 · Dec 6, 2009

GaryW said:
photonut2008 said:

agorabasta said:

The patterns are absolutely identical in those 'images'.

Click to expand...

Well, then so much for your hypothesis that ISO 100 would generate a "noise-free" file when underexposed by two stops, since it mostly has the same level of noise as the ISO 400 shot that was exposed at the same EV.

Click to expand...

But if it was random noise, why do the patterns look the same?

I suppose that is because the noise is not absolutely random, but it is still noise. Let me put this another way. Here are crops from three shots taken at ISO 400 properly exposed, at ISO 100 underexposed by two stops, and ISO 100 properly exposed:

GaryW said:
I would expect true noise to stick out like a speckled mess, and each photo to generate a different set of random variation in the noise. What did I do wrong?

These are still moderate ISOs, and not the extreme ISOs that are so often used to "demonstrate" these cameras' "image quality." Indeed, this is one of my pet peeves that in part provoked me to reply to this thread. Maybe it's what I did right rather than something you did wrong, I used a tripod to keep the sensor precisely aligned and took the shots within seconds of each other under constant light (from the afternoon sun), so if the source of the noise is the same for both shots then its pattern is also the same.

GaryW said:
As for ISO 400, if you underexpose ISO 100 by two stops, shouldn't it look similar to ISO 400 exposed properly?

On my A850 I'm seeing issues with that which probably has something to do with some non-linearity of the sensor. Not all the noise is the same and neither are the colors between the underexposed ISO 100 shot and and the ISO 400 shot taken at the same EV.
--
Anthony Beach

notpc · Dec 6, 2009

Who programmed you to spout that sort of thing?

Lyle From Canada said:
Lyle From Canada wrote:
I couldnt disagree with this more. Framed prints are what photography is about.

Phixel wrote:

notpc · Dec 6, 2009

Awww. Did somebody interrupt your false reality with truth?

Most people rarely print.

liquid stereo said:
liquid stereo wrote:
such foolishness in public.

maurus_e · Dec 6, 2009

Gary is right here. If his test shows more or less identical patterns then this is - strictly speaking - not noise (per definition a random phenomenon). It is 'regular' behaviour, generated somewhere between A/D conversion and processing. The problem with that is that (as agorabasta said somewhere up in the thread) it does not scale as noise, but can lead to patterns in further processing.

--
http://www.pbase.com/maurus_e/

headofdestiny · Dec 6, 2009

Anthony, FWIW, ISO 320 is usually the best ISO of the A900 according to Iliah, and I expect it is the same with the A850.

Agorobasta, I certainly prefer my A900 over my A700 in print at all ISOs.

Phixel, it is fine if print quality doesn't matter to you, but you have to realize that this marginalizes your opinion in a photography forum, as printing is generally the point.

Michel J · Dec 6, 2009

agorabasta said:
Lr3 beta is much better than all versions of DxO. Try it, it's free for now.

For the noise I guess it's not (and after some experimentation/tests I'm sure it's not).

You use to try the last version of DxO'?

Regards,
--
Michel J

beakydave · Dec 6, 2009

Tuputam said:
No, the thread is silly because the only purpose of this thread was to take a dig at cameras that you don't own. >

Good grief. How black is that kettle looking now?

beakydave · Dec 6, 2009

Tuputam said:
Tuputam said:

Agorabasta has posted enough in the past to show that he knows his stuff too

Click to expand...

That maybe true in the past, but he lost a lot of credibility in this thread. I will take Canon 7D over A700 any day, despite the imaginary better A700 RAW file at ISO 3200. The thread is silly.

The amount of credibility he may have lost on this single thread still well exceeds any you ever had in the first place.

Remember this?

http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/read.asp?forum=1037&message=33253206

agorabasta · Dec 6, 2009

headofdestiny said:
Anthony, FWIW, ISO 320 is usually the best ISO of the A900 according to Iliah, and I expect it is the same with the A850.

Agorobasta, I certainly prefer my A900 over my A700 in print at all ISOs.

Phixel, it is fine if print quality doesn't matter to you, but you have to realize that this marginalizes your opinion in a photography forum, as printing is generally the point.

The 'best' for something, like DR, does not mean the best overall. The best for low noise is still ISO100. And if the scene does not require too much DR, you're much better served with ISO100. And the whole ISO320 debacle stems mostly from wrong default black subtraction levels in a900-850-700 cams. Though there happens some real advantage in using 320, the usefulness of it is too limited; and the harm from not using ISO speeds below 320 far outweighs its benefits.

I would too prefer an a900 image over a700 due to smoother gradients (tonality) and much higher resolution, a slightly higher noise is easily 'filtered out' in our brains if NR hasn't ruined the image before. Still the advantage of a900 over a700 shows only in very few specific scene types.

On printing you are totally wrong. Having a good electronic image makes it possible to have many different printouts and to watch the image on gorgeous monitors over 50' size. Thus an electronic image is a much bigger thing than a print, as it 'contains' all the possible prints in itself.

beakydave · Dec 6, 2009

+1

Two well-known photographers (one a studio professional, the other one of the UK's best-regarded wildlifeshooters) once told me exactly the same thing (their source may have been the same of course):

"If a photograph is worth looking at then print it"

Of course, my hard drives are full of images that never have seen, and never will see, paper. Go figure

photonut2008 said:
Phixel said:

photonut2008 said:

Whatever floats your boat, I get more sustained enjoyment from a print on my wall than an image on my computer's monitor.

Click to expand...

Right. That is why you spend so much time staring at your computer monitor and posting on this forum!

Click to expand...

One has nothing to do with the other. I did not say I spend hours and hours staring at the prints on my walls, or that I never view images on my computer. I merely said I enjoy my prints on my walls more than my images on my computer. Any photo I have on my computer's hard drive and at my online gallery that really catches my imagination, ends up as a print that spends time on one of my walls.

photonut2008 said:

And I am sure you only read the articles on the internet and never look at any pictures !

Click to expand...

I read articles on the Internet, but (FWIW) I mostly avoid your posts and threads. I also read books on photography. Yes, I also look at people's photos at various websites.

That said, I find my 22" monitor too limiting for many of my photos. That's why I bought the A850, so I could make even bigger prints that are rich in detail and viewed with equal satisfaction from across the room and up close. Finally, when I go to other people's homes I do not see the photos on their computers, I see the photos on their walls.
--
Anthony Beach

agorabasta · Dec 6, 2009

mike_2008 said:
And this use of p&s as if you're talking about it as a useful tool when in reailty most people would see it as a pejorative term is completely disingenuous.

The term p&s is neutral. It's your perception that makes it 'pejorative' to you. And as such it's your personal psychological problem. You really need to stop associating your very self with your hardware - that's a very sick thing to do.

A550 raw noise vs A850 vs Canon 7D

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