ISO 800 ZERO NR SD1 TEST (very low light)

A casual test shot in low light with some 100% crops:













Any softness is the fault of the lens (30mm prime)

I was presently surprised at the result!

After all of your howling about sharpness, I thought you wanted softness.

Thanks for posting though.

cinefeel said:

A casual test shot in low light with some 100% crops:













Any softness is the fault of the lens (30mm prime)

I was presently surprised at the result!

Click to expand...

--
Laurence
laurence at appledore-farm dot com

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What's the color temperture of the lighting? Sigmas have always done alright at iso 800 under full spectrum lighting, it's tungsten, with its 2 stops of missing blue light, that causes the problem.

This is tungsten light, single (dim and old) bulb in a dark room.

And Mr. Matson: I like natural sharpness, Mr. Rytterfalk agrees than your cat is oversharpened!!

looks good quality- lots of detail

but whats with the color transitions top left - or is it my monitor ? (could be as Firefox sometimes doesn't render colours properly on my machine)

cinefeel said:

This is tungsten light, single (dim and old) bulb in a dark room.

Click to expand...

Then it's a very good shot. Thanks for posting.

I will post some raws, gotta find some hosting. Will do a proper shootout actually, with some other cams...

In the meantime another ISO 800 test (B&W):





Make sure to click TWICE for full size, otherwise it looks smeared!

I tinted in SPP then increased vibrance in PS...

If someone doesn't have an easy idea for hosting your RAW files I can create a way to host them on one of my servers.

I like the way you rendered the cluttered scene with just slightly more X3 fill light than I would expect, to hit just a little harder with the realism of it.

This level of image quality at ISO800 is much better than I can expect from my SD15 at ISO800, but I am not using the best tools such as some others on this forum would.

Did the camera get this particular white balance by itself, or did you have to tweak it in post?

I'm guessing I could get similar results with my SD15 at ISO400 if I had the postprocessing skills. Do you think this is possible, or is there something subtly beyond SD15 capabilities going on here?
--
Tom Schum

Thanks for posting - very interesting.

First, even without the RAWs, I think the IQ is very good for a sub $2000 camera.

Even on a lousy, uncalibrated monitor, there are only a small amount of blotches.
(A pity Sigma has added a MF tax of $8000)

It is VERY nice to see that Sigma somehow must have got the weak blue channel under control. Tungsten only, and -1EV with the SD14 or 15 would have looked awful in the shadows.

-1EV, btw - how did you meter?

Was it the dark handle in the centre that made you turn down exposure, or is generally necessary?

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I did have to tweak the color by using the dropper on a neutral area.

I would say that when exposed and processed correctly in SPP, the SD1 has a one stop noise advantage over the SD15. Which is pretty much as advertised, I suppose.

People forget that the SD15 has noise reduction baked-in at low ISO.

...and on the subject of metering:

the SD1 always overexposes by default. roughly a stop over at times. it appears to meter to avoid shadow clipping, rather than highlight clipping.

this is good and bad, in a way. the camera seems to give optimal results when you overexpose and then pull down in post, as long as you have enough headroom. really it depends on what you expect from your finished image.

i only use the default metering in low-contrast scenes. the higher the contrast, the more i will minus EV.

what would be best is if sigma could add a live histogram to the SD1!

cinefeel said:

A casual test shot in low light with some 100% crops:

Click to expand...

cinefeel,

I very much like your sample photo. I think it is one of the best images that I've seen thus far coming out of the SD1 - at any ISO - let alone at ISO 800.

And even though I earlier chided you about not posting any SD1 samples, You have clearly shown that you have an excellent natural feel for mood and composition. And it would most definitely appear that do indeed own the new SD1 -- with it's "Color Space-Bugs" and all.

This particular "test" image is quite good and excels (IMO) in almost every important image parameter: regarding it's general content (the feel), it's pleasing (non-magenta tinged) color-cast - effectively emphasizing the naturally present cool-white lighting tones, which nicely illuminate the reflective sheen of the metallic objects and really helps set-off the images dominant blue tiling background.

I also liked very much that it doesn't appear that you at all tried to physically clean-up, or otherwise consciously (re)arrange the images numerous objects - giving it an overall, hyper-realistic 'as-it-is' still life feel and atmosphere.

The fine detail seems good for this level of ISO (800) and lower lighting conditions. There does appear to be some mild noise reduction in play - even though you say you applied none. It is coming from some sort of a in-camera default noise-reduction feature which automatically kicks in as the ISO increases? It really isn't at all applied too strongly - but does seem to noticeably rendering a kind of a artistic painting-like smoothness to the overall quality of the photo.

I would love to see you post the full RAW file of this wonderful image - either here on DPReview, or wherever you can comfortably post a larger file size..

And please do keep on producing more of these kinds of exemplary "test" shots - which are really much better than almost all of the other Sigma sanctioned SD1 sample images I've seen coming out of Sigma's stable of "professional" Pooh-bah's with their tightly controlled official SD1 image postings.

The working week has begun but will post a number of raws very soon!

Really glad you like the image. Haven't taken any serious shots yet but plan to do so soon, so far I've just been taking snaps to experiment with the settings and processing.

I should have specified that I left the chroma noise reduction at a default level, and instead turned the luminance noise reduction off. That's probably what you're seeing.

I have no doubt that better noise results can be achieved, either with Silkypix Pro or an update of the SPP code. At the moment it is not optimised for SD1 in the least!

The default gamma curves, color processing, not to mention the bugs, all terrible. It can only get better from here.

P.S. I should mention that the B&W exposure of the dog may look like bright light, but it was also extremely dim. Not comfortable light for reading even. I thought that turned out well for the camera, handheld too.

I found a bug using negative fill light on one image from Low Freq. The girl in the blue dress turned into jagged horizontal lines when X3 fill was at -.6.

If this was dim tungsten light I would say this camera is very useful for most work.

It almost seems that the image noise is from the amplifier and not the sensor. If it was the sensor we would be seeing more noise based on what is seen at lower ISOs.

Yes, I've said this before. Any problems with the SD1 are to do with processing, not the sensor, and there's a huge amount of room still for improvement!

I hope Sigma up there game here, because they've got some great technology on their hands. Or at least Foveon does, I should say!

A very nice image, really like the lighting... and it confirms what I have been saying about the ISO being better than people think.

In the absence of Sigma posting higher ISO sample photos it's just this kind of thing that helps people understand what the camera can do.

--
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Except that it was not sharpened, Mr Whatever. If you are saying that every Foveon image is sharpened if is as 0.0, fine. But you are likely saying something else, since you complain about your 30 mm lens's lack of sharpness.

As I said, make up your mind.

cinefeel said:

And Mr. Matson: I like natural sharpness, Mr. Rytterfalk agrees than your cat is oversharpened!!

Click to expand...

--
Laurence
laurence at appledore-farm dot com

La chance ne sourit qu'aux esprits bien préparés.
Chance favors the prepared mind.
Louis Pasteur

http://www.pbase.com/lmatson
http://www.pbase.com/sigmadslr
http://www.howardmyerslaw.com

is there any reason to set the chroma noise reduction to default? may you post the image with chrominance noise reduction to zero?
Thank you.

To L. Matson:

Yes, that is exactly what I am saying.

0 sharpening (according to the SPP slider) is EXTREMELY oversharpened, that much should be obvious.

-2.0 is totally unsharpened, and is equivalent to roughly what -0.8 was in SPP4.2

-1.2 is therefore equivalent to what 0.0 was in SPP4.2

The numbers SPP uses mean absolutely nothing in an of themselves!