Still loving the M6II, even more with new DXO

Alastair Norcross wrote:

I upgraded to DXO PL6 when they offered the Black Friday discounts (not as big as last year, but still quite good). I had read conflicting things about how much of an improvement Deep Prime XD is over regular Deep Prime. So far, I am liking DPXD a lot. Some people say they are seeing artefacts with it, and turn down the noise model slider (it's very customizable), but I can't say I've seen any yet. Here are some comparisons from last night. We went to see a friend in an opera (Amahl and the Night Visitors), and took her out for a drink afterwards to a very dimly lit bar. Here are one each of her, my wife, and our son, first with regular Deep Prime, followed by Deep Prime XD:

I'm very impressed with DPXD. The main advantage over Deep Prime seems to be in reducing shadow noise. If you view the indoor shots at 100% (they are already reduced to 2000 pixels on the long side for the web), you'll see quite a difference in the noise in the background shadows. I think I'm also seeing a bit more detail in the XD versions, though, as I said, that can be fine-tuned with sliders. The main drawback is processing time. Exporting 6 files to JPEG (2000 pixels on the longer side) took 51 seconds with Deep Prime, and 91 seconds with Deep Prime XD, so that's 8.5 seconds per file compared with 15.2 seconds. I think ultra-high ISO shots take longer (wouldn't be surprising). I timed a different batch of 25 exports in Deep Prime XD, with files in the ISO 1000-3200 range, and that averaged 11 seconds per image. For me, the gain in IQ is worth a bit of an extra wait. I think it's quite remarkable that I can get perfectly usable shots from a crop sensor camera at ISO 25,600.

Very nice write-up Alastair.  I did the same on Black Friday!

My findings are that DPXD yields at least as clean results as DP, but with improved detail retention.  Quite a bit more detail in many cases, but without the typical artifacts that sharpening produces (halos, crunchiness, etc).

There are instances however where the drawing out of detail does cause a loss of smoothness in say the eye (basically right where you want smoothness).  So ideally (for me) it would be DPXD for the entire image, and DP for just the eyeball. 

R2