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Why is there no progress Dynamic range?
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Interceptor121
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The A7RII introduced the 42 megapixel sensor but the dr is 1 full stop leas than current models
The A7 III has been significant improvement and since only minor increases
The sensor ranking of the 42 megapixel A7R III is the same of the current A7R V
So in the effect 8 years pretty static as back illuminated sensor have matured
now I think stacked sensor will improve to match
the other question is do you need more peak DR or other things like low light performance color depth etc etc
I photograph people living in harsh nature, dynamic range is very important to me, I have Sony a7iii and Sony a7riii. Unfortunately, there are no developments that increase dynamic range and iso performance.
One of the sample photos I took
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Interceptor121
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This image doesnt have light sources and has snow. The camera metering will not work you need to use zebra to make sure the snow hits 85%I photograph people living in harsh nature, dynamic range is very important to me, I have Sony a7iii and Sony a7riii. Unfortunately, there are no developments that increase dynamic range and iso performance.
One of the sample photos I took
i dont see this image as one requiring lots of dynamic range. That would be typically a backlit scene or a sunset sunrise
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I'm not asking you if this photo needs dynamic range, sometimes I shoot people like this indoors, sometimes I need a lot of dynamic range flexibility.This image doesnt have light sources and has snow. The camera metering will not work you need to use zebra to make sure the snow hits 85%I photograph people living in harsh nature, dynamic range is very important to me, I have Sony a7iii and Sony a7riii. Unfortunately, there are no developments that increase dynamic range and iso performance.
One of the sample photos I took
i dont see this image as one requiring lots of dynamic range. That would be typically a backlit scene or a sunset sunrise
I'm asking why dynamic range hasn't improved over the years.
Some people like me need dynamic range and good iso performance rather than speed.
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Interceptor121
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Sure but indoor photos dont have dynamic range either. Whats exactly you cannot shoot)I'm not asking you if this photo needs dynamic range, sometimes I shoot people like this indoors, sometimes I need a lot of dynamic range flexibility.This image doesnt have light sources and has snow. The camera metering will not work you need to use zebra to make sure the snow hits 85%I photograph people living in harsh nature, dynamic range is very important to me, I have Sony a7iii and Sony a7riii. Unfortunately, there are no developments that increase dynamic range and iso performance.
One of the sample photos I took
i dont see this image as one requiring lots of dynamic range. That would be typically a backlit scene or a sunset sunrise
I'm asking why dynamic range hasn't improved over the years.
Some people like me need dynamic range and good iso performance rather than speed.
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Bassman2003
Senior Member
It appears speed and megapixels are the low hanging fruit in the photo world. Dynamic range seems to be the most difficult to improve. Do we need more DR? Yes on all accounts. Digital images are trapped in the low teens when it comes to DR and one must shoot RAW and bend the highlights and shadows to stand a chance.
Why folks try to 'defend' the current state of cameras like you are asking too much or do not know what you are doing when the topic is brought up is beyond me. Snow in direct sunlight with a mountain valley in shadow doesn't need much DR?
I think what we are looking for is to not have to bend the image so much or take a 10 image tone map to deal with large contrast ratios. But it is tough.
I remember a Canon rep quite a few years ago rolling his eyes saying that customers want more DR. This was when the cameras were around 8-9 stops!
We have enough speed, megapixels and features imho. DR is what really improves imagery imho. The pace of development is just a lot slower than the rest of the attributes.
Why folks try to 'defend' the current state of cameras like you are asking too much or do not know what you are doing when the topic is brought up is beyond me. Snow in direct sunlight with a mountain valley in shadow doesn't need much DR?
I think what we are looking for is to not have to bend the image so much or take a 10 image tone map to deal with large contrast ratios. But it is tough.
I remember a Canon rep quite a few years ago rolling his eyes saying that customers want more DR. This was when the cameras were around 8-9 stops!
We have enough speed, megapixels and features imho. DR is what really improves imagery imho. The pace of development is just a lot slower than the rest of the attributes.
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Thank you for the answer.
Sometimes when shooting people indoors, you need a lot of dynamic range to bring out the dark parts later on. I try not to go above 3200 iso, but sometimes I wish I needed a camera with a better dynamic range.
Companies have made continuous progress in speed in recent years.
UncleVanya
Veteran Member
How do you display your images? What do you have that gives more dr than the camera? This isn’t a trick question. I personally don’t know of much that does. Printing certainly doesn’t. Most monitors don’t either. At least not with an a7riii class sensor.
Interceptor121
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Printing has typically 6.5 stop and a good monitor 10 which is the most you can squeeze in sRGB
HDR has more. An indoor photo not pointing at a light source will have little DR the op is confusing SNR with DR which are related but not identical
The shots in the snow can push the camera to the limit however even that jpeg is not clipped and with a mask shadows can be lifted selectively
Cameras are pretty good with shadows not so much with highlights
Hotel Lonely
Leading Member
Sensor size draws the upper limit of a certain DR you can get with a certain amount of light. That is the law of physics. It's almost like "you can approach light speed but you can never exceed light speed", and we're already very close to the end there.
All technologies are just trying to approach that upper limit. And we're quite close to it already. Sensors used like the A7R3 are basically 95% there if not 99% there.
Extreme high dynamic range in bright area also can cause reduced high ISO performance. Because the conversion gain has to be very low.
So other than that, people try to cheat, try to get more amount of light. But to get more light it requires either longer exposure time, or larger aperture. Both come at a cost, it's either motion blur or size of lens or shallow DOF.
So it's a game of balance. You can't get everything for nothing in physics.
With speed, some unique cheats can be done, for example we can have long-short HDR exposures to concat dynamic range with minimized motion blur. This is especially useful when you're in bright scenario. Those 30fps cameras can do a 20ev HDR in a split second so most of the HDR ghosting won't show.
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let me explain it further:
the dynamic range is decided by signal to noise ratio.
signal is all the light you can gather.
noise is from the light itself, and the camera's read noise.
the camera's read noise is incredibly low these days, including your A7iii and A7Riii, so in most of the time, what's limiting you is the noise of the light.
On the sensor, there's one more trick you can do: adjust the conversion gain, or "real Base ISO" which is a bad term but easier to understand. However this comes at a cost, the lower the conversion gain, the worse the read noise performance. It's not a problem in bright sunlight, but it's a problem for shadows or night shots.
Which is why nowadays cameras come with a dual-gain system that can switch between low-high conversion gains. This is the last trick we have before introducing other sacrifices.
Unfortunately, because you have very limited approaches to manipulate the light you get, all other tricks usually causes either ghosting (temporal artefacts) or overall worse noise performance. To minimize ghosting, you have to have very fast sensors. Or, if you don't want to have any ghosting, you can try in frame HDR, which is usually applied via some strange quad bayer sensors... blah blah blah, and you get worse noise performance everywhere, but in general higher dynamic range. All nasty tradeoffs.
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Hotel Lonely
Leading Member
In such case all you can do is to get the A9iii and do exposure brackets in the highest speed possible. That's how speed returns you favor, though at a cost of processing and slight motion blurs.I photograph people living in harsh nature, dynamic range is very important to me, I have Sony a7iii and Sony a7riii. Unfortunately, there are no developments that increase dynamic range and iso performance.
One of the sample photos I took
AlephNull
Veteran Member
Equally, not everyone needs enormous dynamic range.
One of the reasons that the A9 III was heavily criticised was an apparent lack of dynamic range (although compared with other cameras are ISO 250, it's fine. Better than quite a few, in fact).
So the question is, how much dynamic range do you need? And what are you willing to trade off to get it?
Of course, not everyone needs dynamic range, but when we look at the developments in speed and dynamic range over the last 8 years, speed always comes to the fore.
Am I right?
Interceptor121
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bracketing shots in daylight and snow is not an issue the shutter speed is really high and the readout of a camera like the A1 means no motion issues between shots this is the quickest way to expand dynamic rangeIn such case all you can do is to get the A9iii and do exposure brackets in the highest speed possible. That's how speed returns you favor, though at a cost of processing and slight motion blurs.I photograph people living in harsh nature, dynamic range is very important to me, I have Sony a7iii and Sony a7riii. Unfortunately, there are no developments that increase dynamic range and iso performance.
One of the sample photos I took
however again after tone mapping you will display best 10 shots so all HDR merge will do is to bring shadows
i have evalauted with current sony performance -2 0 +2 is not worth it you need -3 0 +3 to ahve a real benefit otherwise pulling up the shadows works equally well and you can denoise if needed
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Hotel Lonely
Leading Member
As I have stated above, there's nothing much more left to be improved over dynamic range. This is a dead end already.
UncleVanya
Veteran Member
I would argue that even if there is some miraculous gain available, adding dynamic range is very limited in appeal to most photographers at this point. The increased range already available today has reached a point that is not very limiting. Speed and resolution sell more cameras than additional dynamic range. Even resolution is a hard sell today. The difference between 45mp and 61mp is not enough to push buyers from Nikon to Sony or keep Sony users from going to Nikon in general, it seems most are more motivated by other factors.
Sensor technology is at its upper limit in terms of DR. To improve on that, you would need a completely different technology not based on Bayer sensors, which doesn't exist.
Personally, I think that the next meaningful step in improved DR will come from speed. The Sony A9iii has something called composite RAW where it takes 4, 8, 16, or 32 RAW photos in rapid succession (at 120 fps) which you can later merge on a computer using Sony Imaging Edge to reduce noise. AFAIK this currently does not allow you to include exposure bracketing.
However with a sensor like the one in the A9iii, if you add enough CPU power for let's say a maximum full RAW fps of 240, you could in theory take 2 full RAW photos at 1/120s each at different exposures and merge them into a single image with more DR and less noise. Or 4 RAWs at 1/60s each.
Phone cameras do this all the time of course, they have a lot less sensor data to process and a lot more processing power. Cameras will move in that direction and one day, we'll be able to exposure bracket at useful shutter speeds; somewhere down the road, the cameras will even do the merging in-camera on the fly.
Personally, I think that the next meaningful step in improved DR will come from speed. The Sony A9iii has something called composite RAW where it takes 4, 8, 16, or 32 RAW photos in rapid succession (at 120 fps) which you can later merge on a computer using Sony Imaging Edge to reduce noise. AFAIK this currently does not allow you to include exposure bracketing.
However with a sensor like the one in the A9iii, if you add enough CPU power for let's say a maximum full RAW fps of 240, you could in theory take 2 full RAW photos at 1/120s each at different exposures and merge them into a single image with more DR and less noise. Or 4 RAWs at 1/60s each.
Phone cameras do this all the time of course, they have a lot less sensor data to process and a lot more processing power. Cameras will move in that direction and one day, we'll be able to exposure bracket at useful shutter speeds; somewhere down the road, the cameras will even do the merging in-camera on the fly.
Interceptor121
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if you simply stack exposures you reduce noise but don't exceed the maximum dynamic range limit given by the bit depth of the camera which is 14 stops
At some point you will have removed all the noise but that is pretty much it.
Generally for daylight exposures at base ISO stacking has little benefit and so does noise reduction as the read noise has limited impact on the expousure. Either way you can simply apply noise reduction to improve your image a little.
In order to get greater dynamic range you need higher bit depth for example 16 bits RAW then you have the headroom to allow other techniques to kick in
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