… Sigma and Wabi Sabi

xpatUSA wrote:

Brev00 wrote:

Scottelly wrote:

Iain G Foulds wrote:

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… My crusade is that the vintage Foveons are perfectable… or at least measurably improved. Believe that their flaws discouraged all but the most patient, technical photographers, relegating their brilliant and unique cameras to essential obscurity.

<>To compete with the crowd though, Foveon has to step up to another level, so it can perform reasonably well at ISO 3200 and above,

My question is whether the high ISO limitations of the foveon sensor are inherent in the tech.

I believe so. 'High ISO' sounds grand but the reality is that it means low exposure of the sensor. Scott's target of 3200 ISO means the sensor is underexposed by 6EV which in turn means a Merrill for example would be 64/4080 raw value, where 4080 is a typical Merrill clipping level.

The literature effectively says time and again that the Foveon is not adept at low exposure anywhere in any image. It only looks "better" these days due to continuing "improvement" in SPP or elsewhere. In other words, I am saying that the sensor technology itself is fundamentally flawed at low exposure.

To me, the technical Foveon advantage remains only in the lack of color aliasing because of the stacking of the three sub-pixels. Anything else is just processing, grump.

It's not just aliasing -- the colour mosaics give the image a subtle general blur, which is only obvious when you compare directly with a Foveon image. The Foveon camera has a grip on the subject.

However, most photographers never see the difference; and Topaz Sharpen goes some way toward getting the same result. But Topaz can add artefacts when it's in a bad mood.

Don