adegroot wrote:
To Hulyss and to anyone to whom it may concern:
I do not understand your apparent preoccupation with this rant. I just borrowed an SD1 from a friend, and returned it today after trying it for 3 weeks. Have I mastered this camera in those 3 weeks? No, not at all. Have all my shots been winners, from a technical perspective? No, certainly not the ones shot under difficult light circumstances.
I cannot take any rants against DPQ at this early stage of a camera just being out too seriously, because we need more time, and more user feedback, more observations, as well as my own experiences, before I can truly form any educated opinion about this new camera.
I hate pixel peepers, because it has nothing to do with reality and with the printed output. They are technology junkies, not photographers. Only with the advent of digital I have seen this kind of ranting going on all websites about all brands of digital cameras, like a wild spreading contagious disease. It's awful. We truly live, most regretfully, in an age of complainers, to whom the glass is always half empty all the time, instead of half full. They do not know how to be grateful. They complain instead of offering real constructive feedback. They act full of hubris and have to just let everyone know how full they are of negativity, and how important THEIR opinions just are. They don't understand the beauty of gratitude. They don't truly appreciate the technical challenges Sigma is facing not only perfecting the Foveon imager, but also facing the competition.
The shape of the Q is on purpose: 1) to be unique and to standout (a brilliant move, I think); 2) to provide ample solidity for handheld shooting. A serious camera shouldn't be toy size.
These were two points expressly made by Sigma, and I agree.
My humble advice: let us gather all the experiences and observations from everyone, compare notes, and then decide the true objective pluses and minuses of this new camera (as much as THAT is possible! Haha).
We all know one thing already in advance: NO camera is perfect. Let's keep that in mind before we rip things apart. It serves no real purpose to act like a hungry pack of wolves, ready to shred any new object into little pieces.
When people complain about a little noise at 200% magnification on their monitor, is that being realistic? I print never smaller than 13x19, and often larger. I go to 200% to make sure there is no dust. Those pixel peeper doomsday sayers, do they ever print super large, where it might matter? And then there is viewing distance, which most people seem to forget. One is NOT to put their nose on large prints, but view them properly: from a certain distance. A small amount of imperfection doesn't bother anyone who takes in the entire photograph as one united entity.
Foveon is not great in low light; this we already know. Whatever they can improve here, great. That's a bonus. It's an inherent characteristic of the sensor. That's a given; get over it.
To me photography has to remain an art. At least, as a fine arts photographer, I personally think so. The output from my DP2M is many times better than what e.g. my Contax G with very sharp lenses and very fine grain film Velvia 50ASA film ever gave me. And yet, scanned at 4800 I still get wonderful 13x19 prints and from the rest of my old collection of slides I'm still scanning.
We have come a long way, and I am extremely grateful for that. The cost savings over film are enormous! A roll of 35mm slide film is about 10 dollars, plus processing and shipping/handling or gasoline to a local lab. That's $20 US; or about 50 cents per image. Let's say the camera costs you $500. A thousand dollars (cost of the Q) would give you just 1000 shots. Many shots won't be good. Since the Q is more like at least a 645 medium film format in IQ, the costs math would be worse.
So, we have come a long way indeed. Technically things are looking good, artistically, it's a different story, alas. Too much depressing stuff in so-called fine arts photography, if you ask me. That's what I think. It saddens me that often the ugly and weird is being rewarded and the beautiful is ignored as too commonplace. My brother is a sculptor and he thinks the same as I do.
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https://www.flickr.com/photos/88681310@N05/8092251359/
Shot with homemade 617 camera and 110mm Rodenstock lens
I like that you are asking for people to give Sigma some slack . . . but do you really want to do that? Sure, the DP2 Quattro is a step up from the DP2 Merrill . . . because it's faster and has a longer battery life . . . but really it's not much different, and Sigma has had years to make a significant improvement. I think the DP2 Quattro is a nice improvement and a significant one, but not as much of an improvement as I would like to see. This is where I agree with crazy H. The new Sigma is an interesting and different camera, but it is not worth buying, if you already have a DP2 Merrill. I'm willing to bet that Sigma knows this already. It's a nice upgrade though, if your DP2 Merrill is getting old, and you want something a bit faster, and you're sick of switching batteries all the time. Or if you have a DP1 Merrill and a DP3 Merrill, and you want a DP2 model, and you'd like to try something new and maybe a little faster. I would maybe get a DP2 Merrill at this point in time, because they're so much cheaper, but it seems to me that a year from now people won't look back on the Merrills and think Sigma made a big mistake . . . if they really do discontinue the Merrill models. Maybe they won't though. Imagine if they continue to sell the Merrills for $699 and bring the price of the Quattros down to $899. That would be cool. Very cool. And it COULD happen.
What you said about people not analyzing and arguing about image quality and stuff like that back in the days of film . . . just totally wrong. YOU ARE MISTAKEN.
In the days of film people were just as crazy about testing films to see what the grain patterns were like, how they reacted to different processing, etc. They did the same with paper, lenses, filters, etc. etc. In fact, it might have been worse back then. I have a LOT of old photography magazines I could show you that are full of articles about various lenses and films. They analyzed the hell out of stuff in the 1980s (and the 1990s). Most of the time it was about 35mm film and cameras and lenses, but they had articles about medium format too. I had subscriptions to Popular Photography, Photographic, Modern Photography, and PHOTO for a few years. I was a photographer in the days of the emergence of auto-focus, and people complained that auto-focus wasn't necessary or would never work as well as a professional could focus manually. Boy were they wrong. The point is . . . you have forgotten about all the debates that raged when a new film would come on the market, such as Kodak Gold 100 or the "new" 1000 ASA films.
Here's just one example. I went and pulled an old Modern Photography magazine out of a stack of old magazines I have in a closet: VOLUME 49 NUMBER 8 - August 1985
In there, on page 40 & 41 (and continued on page 118) there's an section headed "Keppler's SLR Notebook" that has the title "Can An Inexpensive Zoom Equal A Touted Micro Lens?" In the article Herbert Keppler compares a Nikon Series E 75-150mm f3.5 zoom against a Micro-Nikkor 105mm f2.8, and it includes close-up crops, shot at various apertures, etc. In the end he states, "Using the Nikon and Nikkor lenses as examples, I hope we've given you insight into the old micro-macro battle, the truth of zoom vs. single focal length quality and what can make one top optical quality lens less expensive than another." That's just one article in the first magazine I picked out and looked through.
Today we have forums where anyone who wants to can weigh in. Of course we'll have more pixel-peeping happening. But relatively speaking we DID have such debates decades ago, in the peak of the film era.
