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The secret of old DSLRs

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steephill said:
No, those 10 year old DSLRs did not have great dynamic range. By today's standards they were quite poor. Nor did they exhibit low noise characteristics. I still have my 10 year old 6 Mp APS-C DSLR and in the right conditions I can still produce good images with it but current cameras have it beat on every level.
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Carsten Pauer 2 said:
Member said:
The photos where stunning !!!
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First Question: What You mean exactly with "stunning !!!" ?

Is "stunning !!!" like:
  • A Photo from a beautiful Woman ?
  • A Photo with tons of Colors ?
  • A sharp Photo ?
  • ...
Please explain what You exactly mean with the Term: "stunning !!!".
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well, maybe stunning is not the work here unless there was a beautiful woman in it ;)

but the for my eye most of these photos had good dynamic range, color and some clarity in it. Like I say I did not go any pixel level analysis and this all to the naked eye.
 
Glen Barrington said:
It is probably one of the cameras with the Kodak sensor, so the colors offered up are very "Kodaky" in nature. This is what people in North America (and maybe the rest of the world as well) grew up thinking of as "good".

This is one of the reasons I haven't gotten rid of my 8 meg E500 yet. (The others are, there is no residual economic value in it anyway, and that It is one of the most fun cameras to shoot).

In measurable terms these cameras are NOT the equal of modern cameras, so I can't blame people for thinking of them as inferior, since they are. But the jpgs especially do have a quality about them that is hard to replicate.
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mgd43 said:
I look at photos taken with my D50, D40x, and D60 and the color and sharpness are very good. What's not very good is the noise at iso's over 800. The noise at 6400 is less with my D5200 than it is at 1600 with them. Even my new Nikon P7800 compact has lower noise at iso 1600 than my D50, D40x, and D60.
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Agree... maybe high ISO was never the thing with older sensors... but with the right lighting I guess these cameras did well. And this is what I'm trying to point out.. in general these photos are pretty good !!
 
This may surprise you, but the difference in noise between the D5200 and the D40x is about 1 stop. The D40x will beat a modern high-end point-and-shoot like the P7800 by 1.5 stops.

So why are those old photos at ISO1600 so noisy on the D40x? RAW processing. Both the in-camera RAW-to-JPEG conversion and the RAW-to-JPEG conversion in circa-2007 software was junk. It's gotten a lot better since 2007. If you take some of the shots you took with that D40x, and reprocess with modern RAW software, you'll see that they come out surprisingly well.
 
ioshadha said:
well, maybe stunning is not the work here unless there was a beautiful woman in it ;)
but the for my eye most of these photos had good dynamic range, color and some clarity in it.
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Ah OK,

i Think for the clarity You can use a good and sharp Prime.
For the DR, i use a FinePix S5 Pro. :-)

DR-FinePixS5ProvsD800.png


For Color just push a bit the Saturation...



Regards: Carsten
 
Amamba said:
I agree, the old 6 and 10 mp photos look very clean at ISO. You can only cramp so many pixels on a given size sensor, I guess.
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I think this is true as well... modern day example - Sony NEX 5r/n vs NEX 7. We all know this is a fact...
 
nelsonal said:
Few scenes truly demand modern sensors (the only image I can recall that would have needed more dynamic range was a moon rise where very shortly after the moon's rise/sun's set the moon was substantially brighter than the other elements in the scene).

Also, a 6-10 mp image means a smaller enlargement (when pixel peeped) than a 24-36mp image (36mp is like viewing the an 8 mp image at 400%, if one does that noise is going to be pretty obvious). It's pretty tough to beat the noise performance of a low megapixel camera with even a substantially newer high resolution camera (when both are compared at native resolution). For example a 1DII was a sold noise performer in its day, and does well at native resolution:



but is blown out of the water (two stops behind when the resolution of the resulting images are equalized).

As others mention, good lighting and a compelling subject are generally much more important than noise performance, dynamic range, and other sensor specific things when considering a compelling picture.
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good one !!

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Compact to M43. What's next?
 
Kodachrome200 said:
ioshadha said:
I recently came to realize something interesting about photos taken from old DSLRs.

This all started some time ago when one of my friends showed me some photos taken from a series of his recent trips around the world. The photos where stunning !!! Having an interests in photography I asked him what camera he used for those shots. I expected the answer to be a recent camera with all the bells and whistles... but to my surprise he replied - Ahh, its very old Olympus DSLR and I can't remember the model number. He is definitely not this guy who had any idea of photography at all...

It made me think... and I pulled out some of my own photos from back in the day.. not form a DSLR though. And I did a bit of searching trying to see those photos taken from a DSLR about 10 years ago.. My search showed me that most of these photos are really good.. specially for cameras that had about 6MP or so but APS-C DSLRs. They had great dynamic range, good colors, good IQ in general though I didn't pixel peaking or anything... I thought how?

Is this because those senors had plenty of room for pixels? Was it that they had really low noise? I don't know...

Unfortunately, I can't post this photos I have come across. Maybe you have noted this as well with some of your old photos? I'm not saying these 10 year ago photos are better than the best of the cameras of today but for that time most of those DSLR photos are stunning.

What's your thoughts on this? love to hear your reasoning!!!

Cheers !!
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I took these around nine years ago with a 2MP Epson 850Z, one of my favorite cameras that I still have today, still takes great IRs.



31dc2918d1ec4c668102ac1390779dfb.jpg



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4097053b18ff43689199d828c48f266c.jpg
 
ioshadha said:
The point of this thread is that for some 10 year old sensors and like 6MP resolution they did pretty good... My point is if those camera did well with limited technology at the time then today's DSLR should be much better.
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And you are a fabricating design engineer to state that?

Today's dSLRs are much better than 2003 dSLRs. ISO 3200 10 years ago was pretty poor (aps-c) on the lines of 25,600 today or about 3 stops better or a stop of improvement every 3 years. dSLRs operate much faster with faster startup times, more fps with a lot more pixels. My first dSLR did 2.2 fps for 4 frame - JPG or RAW that's how slow the CPU was and how small the buffer was.

I have a dSLR that came out 10 years ago and I really haven't used it since I bought a dSLR that came out in 2005. It's like choosing to use your "old" computer when you get a new one - what's really the point because the new one is faster.
ioshadha said:
Gosh.. people get so intimidated when someone had to say the old stuff had some good in it!!!
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Of course there is good in it, but 10 years ago there was hardly "great dynamic range" as you put it. Old dSLRs produce very good images - when viewed by themselves, but when compared to what a newer image sensor can produce and newer autofocus, fps, buffer depth they look very weak in comparison.
 
As I look back at all my old images from old DSLRs, they have lower DR, aren't as sharp, the colors aren't as nice and the noise is higher.
 
Try re-processing some of your old photos with new software, I think you'll be surprised. No, they aren't the equal of what a modern camera can do, but they aren't nearly as bad as one might expect, and I think the newer software has something to do with it.

I've been reprocessing some of my old photos as a way to learn some recently purchased software. True, my skills are greater than they were back then, but I also think the software I'm using has improved.

--

I still like soup. . .
Now that you've judged the quality of my typing, take a look at my photos. . .
 
RedFox88 said:
ioshadha said:
The point of this thread is that for some 10 year old sensors and like 6MP resolution they did pretty good... My point is if those camera did well with limited technology at the time then today's DSLR should be much better.
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And you are a fabricating design engineer to state that?

Today's dSLRs are much better than 2003 dSLRs. ISO 3200 10 years ago was pretty poor (aps-c) on the lines of 25,600 today or about 3 stops better or a stop of improvement every 3 years. dSLRs operate much faster with faster startup times, more fps with a lot more pixels. My first dSLR did 2.2 fps for 4 frame - JPG or RAW that's how slow the CPU was and how small the buffer was.

I have a dSLR that came out 10 years ago and I really haven't used it since I bought a dSLR that came out in 2005. It's like choosing to use your "old" computer when you get a new one - what's really the point because the new one is faster.
RedFox88 said:
Gosh.. people get so intimidated when someone had to say the old stuff had some good in it!!!
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Of course there is good in it, but 10 years ago there was hardly "great dynamic range" as you put it. Old dSLRs produce very good images - when viewed by themselves, but when compared to what a newer image sensor can produce and newer autofocus, fps, buffer depth they look very weak in comparison.
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don't want to make this an argument but you too missed the most important portion of my original and earlier reply where I say that everyone agrees new DSLRs are better than the old DSLRs.

This is "not" a old vs new comparison. I'm just saying old DSLRs produce very good photos too with limited technology... question is how. maybe low pixel count helped? I don't know... So I like to hear different opinions.
 
peevee1 said:
mgd43 said:
Even my new Nikon P7800 compact has lower noise at iso 1600 than my D50, D40x, and D60.
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Oh come on.
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The P7800 beats the D50 hands down at iso 1600. The D40x and D60 are closer, but to my eye, which is all that matters to me, the P7800 is a little better. There has been a lot of technological improvement since the D40x and D50.
 
I didn't read whole thread now. It could be someone said it already. The older cameras had CCD sensor, which works different than our CMOS sensors. I think they produce cleaner images on very low I so, but are bad at high I so and are slow. Someone correct me if I'm wrong.
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One thing I noticed long ago in old DSLRs with 4 - 6 MP sensors is a perception of "per-pixel" sharpness, where each pixel could be noticeably different from its neighbors. Lens blur due to diffraction at small apertures and focusing errors, as well as some lens distortions and aberrations were comparable to the pixel size or even smaller.

Today's high-resolution sensors demand better performance from lenses and auto-focus system, making smallest imperfections clearly visible at pixel level.
 
ZodiacPhoto said:
One thing I noticed long ago in old DSLRs with 4 - 6 MP sensors is a perception of "per-pixel" sharpness, where each pixel could be noticeably different from its neighbors. Lens blur due to diffraction at small apertures and focusing errors, as well as some lens distortions and aberrations were comparable to the pixel size or even smaller.

Today's high-resolution sensors demand better performance from lenses and auto-focus system, making smallest imperfections clearly visible at pixel level.
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Glen Barrington said:
Try re-processing some of your old photos with new software, I think you'll be surprised. No, they aren't the equal of what a modern camera can do, but they aren't nearly as bad as one might expect, and I think the newer software has something to do with it.

I've been reprocessing some of my old photos as a way to learn some recently purchased software. True, my skills are greater than they were back then, but I also think the software I'm using has improved.
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Oh, I agree to some extent. I don't know if software has improved, but I know my knowledge of what to do has. But the new cameras are worlds ahead of the old ones.
 
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