DP1 Merrill shots and a question

PrebenR wrote:

Johan Borg wrote:

Roland Karlsson wrote:

It is some kind of consensus here that -2 is no sharpening.

I dont know what they have for proof for that.

So, I sit back and maybe I get some explanations how they know

Try this: Set the camera sharpening to 0 and shoot RAW+JPEG. Compare the out of camera JPEG with the same photo from SPP with -2 and 0. You will see that the photo from SPP with sharpening at -2 is much closer to the out of camera JPEG. In fact, if you took a photo with an old DP at sharpening 0 it would also be rather close to a photo with the new model at -2.

Try that at ISO 3200 or 6400, and compare sharpness. You'll get a different result. I don't see why the software in the cmarea to make JPGS is the golden standard as to how to process the 45Mb data that was recordered. If it was, why can the camera process this in seconds while SPP uses up to a minute?

ISO 3200 has so much noise reduction (=blurring) going on that it's meaningless comparison. Fact is, the new cameras applies far more sharpening compared to the already tack sharp SD14, SD15, DP1, DP1s, DP1x, DP2, DP2s and DP2x which all behave the same. When the new models even behave the same as these in Half-Size and JPEG, then it's easy to conclude that one should consider dialing down sharpening with the Merrills.

When the new model arrived, there were quite a few comments around here about artifacts on pixel-level and suggestions about turning down noise reduction settings. Sure, noise reduction is part of the problem, but it's when you combine with over-sharpening (0.0) that it really looks unnatural.