Lens flare with terrible post-processing - nothing to see here.
J
Happy holidays doc!
You seem to have exactly the right spirit for the holidays...First of all, I know for a fact that Ricoh changed the GR lens design precisely because of the flare issue. And even more interesting for you (and others) to know that they changed the lens design before gr2. Unfortunately I cannot tell you starting which serial number, but later batch of GR's already had the improved lens design. So it is very much possible that your GR belongs to the second group which may explain your reaction. As of the example I shared: that's not terrible pp, that's an actual crop of the dng file.
Happy holidays, once again...
Not cranky - I just like to stick to the known facts, and having long experience of engineering projects large and small I am wary of "proof by repeated assertion".
I don't understand what "an actual crop of the dng file" means. "Linear" DNG is a partly-processed image file that you can visualise directly. However, I understood that the DNG file from a GR is a proper raw file containing the non-demosaiced RGGB Bayer data. If you visualise this data directly it looks like four greyscale images. The example you linked to looked like a crop from a processed image where the darker region had been lifted and the saturation cranked-up.
I'm not saying the GR is the most perfect camera on the market and can never be criticised (this isn't the Leica forum). I'm saying that there is some flare, generally well-controlled like most modern lenses, and the conditions where it is likely to impact the image quality are understood and predictable. There is no need make up a new vocabulary to discuss it. Sometime I think people who are highly critical of the performance of modern digital cameras should be sentenced to 6 months with a folding Zeiss roll-film camera with an uncoated Tessar lens.
Wishing you and your family a happy holiday also.
J
Ok, DJ, this is a much more measured answer, thank you!
I am not spoiled or delusional enough to call GR, (or any modern era camera for that matter) unusable or crap because of a minor issue such as lens flare. But that shouldn't stop us from discussing a problem when we see it. As I tried to explain, Ricoh considered this to be an issue and addressed it themselves. And as I also mentioned in my previous posts, Ricoh considered this problem urgent enough, and didn't even wait for GR II before they redesigned the lens unit.By the way, I never called the GR flare an "orb" myself, but under *extreme* conditions it sure manifests itself much differently than a typical flare artifact. Regarding the example I shared: Without getting too pedantic on what a "crop from a raw file" is, I think everyone understood what I meant: what you "see" on a computer screen when you *first* open a raw file in your favorite raw processor. Of course, every raw developer will need to process the data before you "see" something on your screen, but you sure can't call that "terrible pp", just as you can't call the flare issue as "forum BS", just because someone used the wrong vocabulary to describe it.I will need to look up for the source file, as unfortunately at the time when I shared it, I made the mistake of not naming it properly...not easy for me to look it up among 15000 files now! But if I happen to find it, I would challenge you or anyone else to retain it with proper post processing techniques. Not that it matters, because it was just meant to show the flare in its worst form.
