Disheartening Very Disheartening

Tirpitz666 wrote:

Thank you all for the support and pointers, I bought from Japan and usually I have had on average good experiences with them, they tend to care quite a bit to their gear (although this doesn’t look “as new” by any means from pics).

Regarding the few “real” MPs, based on my other Foveon’s experience, I know that the images will likely stack favourably even to 14-16MP Bayer files

Just really curious about the colours, which in my opinion were never one of the Merrills real forte. Cheers

Interesting how opinions differ so widely.

I've recently undertaken a re-organisation of my 20 year old Lightroom archive. For some reason I organised my files by camera (which was ok in the early years but is now a mess). I've resorted them by year so I can carry out a thorough weeding process ahead of categorising the surviving images by genre to feed my work in progress re-organisation of my website. Phew, that is a lot of re-organisation. I'm glad that for the last 3 years since I moved to darktable, I've followed a more rational plan.

In the process of doing so, I am now able to view every image in the archive in chronological order separate from the camera it was shot on, which means colour differences between cameras really stand out starkly.

And do you know what I discovered? The Foveon images from the SD9, SD14 and DP1 (classic) really stand out from the crowd. For all the wrong reasons. The colour is terrible. Yellow casts, green casts, yellow/green casts, blown dayglo magentas. To the point where most of them are unusable with my 2022 eyes. But not so the DP2M shots. They pretty much blend in with my Bayer shots: "normal" looking balanced colour.

Those early Foveon cameras are all different for colour and mostly bad. Sigma clearly did a lot of experimentation with colour from model to model, trying to decide how they wanted it to render. It took them a while to get it right (with the SD15, I would judge).

I wouldn't go back, and I'd be very cautious about upcoming cameras. Foveon really struggles to get consistent plausible colour IMO, it is clearly much harder than with Bayer CFA sensors, the cameras seem balanced on a colour knife-edge.

CFA cameras' colour is minutely affected by the mix of dyes in the CFA but 99% of the colour is determined by the colour profile used in the raw convertor. If you don't like the colour from a CFA camera, it is easy to change it with a custom profile (DNG profile, if you use ACR/LR) to your taste. I'm not sure this is true of Foveon.

If you prefer the colour of the early models to the later models, all power to you, but not my choice.