MJ_Photo38
Veteran Member
Hello everyone, today I wanted to share my feedback and experience with the Sigma SD Quattro H.
For disclosure, I recently sold that camera, after owning it for about a year. Before I get sidetracked, let’s get into the different attributes of this camera and my opinion about it.
Build quality and ergonomics:
Overall very good, I would even say exceptional; this is probably the absolute best point about that camera : it’s built like a tank, feels like a magnesium alloy slab in your hands. The hand grip is deep, with nice grooves and covered in soft rubber-like plastic. The thumb-rest is very comfortable and overall really nice as far as thumb rests go. My only complaint about the hand placement on this camera is that the grip is a little short. I have large hands, and my pinkie was sometimes on the verge of falling under the grip. It didn’t happen really often, but it was a little too close for comfort.
It’s weather sealed all around, the battery door is spring loaded and has a twisting lock (which is my preferred way of locking a door on any camera), and the battery itself is held in place firmly by a plastic tab. Even if the door opens, the battery won’t fall. The SD card door is just as solid, and the camera is weather sealed all around. First time I see this on any camera : the lens mount on the camera has a rubber gasket to seal the mount, even if the lens you use doesn’t have any rubber gasket. I thought that was a clever design and I wish more brands would do this.
The dials are extremely nice to turn, they’re both made of high quality metal (I suppose aluminium?) with very satisfying clicks. Some of the nicest metal dials I’ve used on a camera for sure.
The buttons are not clicky, they have a soft bottom-out, but they have a lot of travel. I’m used to Nikon buttons which are similar but with a shorter travel and that’s my preference. They’re not perfect, but 100% usable.
There are a couple of switches on the camera, which are very firm : you won’t move them by accident (which is nice since I never had to move them the entire time I owned that camera).
Overall, the SDQ (H) is one of the best built cameras I’ve ever had the pleasure of handling. Its looks are a little bit weird, and the button placement is sometimes a little questionable (especially when it comes to the power button for example), but it was a nice handling experience through and through.
Displays:
When it comes to displays, this is very much the same story : the camera has a pretty good and bright back display which is very sharp. Looking at the black levels, I suppose this is an OLED panel, but I’m not 100% positive. The refresh rate is decent (though this doesn’t really matter with that camera as you’ll see later). Next to it is the info display, which on DSLRs you would traditionally find on the top panel of the camera. It is backlit, with the option to turn it off (when the backlight is off, the information is still displayed on it). It’s overall a pretty nice addition, especially when reviewing pictures, the sub display is showing the exposure parameters of the image displayed.
I wish I could be as positive about the EVF, alas it’s not a very good one. It’s not an OLED, but rather an LCD screen, so your black levels are absolutely not to the same levels as the back screen (and are dark grey rather than black). Colour accuracy is not the best either. Resolution could be higher considering the year of release and the price it was sold at (it’s 2.36M dots, not bad not terrible. A short year later cameras were already using 3.69M dot OLED panels and 2.36M dot OLED EVFs have been used since the early 2010s. The EVF in my 2014’ Fujifilm X-T1 is in a whole different class from the SDQ-H, despite costing a fraction of the cost on the used market and being 3 years older). Overall though, the EVF is usable : it allows you to frame your shot and focus accurately. You won’t be using it a whole lot though, I feel like I’ve been using the back panel a lot more than the EVF.
Image Quality:
This is the most important aspect of the SDQ-H : without high image quality this camera has no point existing. The first thing I’ll say is that when it comes to sharpness and colour rendition, this is probably one of the best, if not the best camera I’ve used. Micro-contrast is excellent on that sensor, and it’s the kind of feature giving you the “wow effect” when you first open the files in your editing software.
Colours are a little tricky to work with sometimes. They are pleasing to the eye when you look at them on the computer, but they rarely depict exactly the scene that it captured. When I was processing the files, it always took me more work to bring the Foveon images to where I wanted them to be compared to Bayer or X-Trans cameras that I own.
Sadly, this is where the positives end. As much as I appreciate the Foveon X3 technology, this is also full of compromises : both of them being high ISO noise performance and dynamic range.
Let’s start with the latter : the SDQ-H doesn’t have a ton of dynamic range. It’s usable, but it’s not anything worth bragging about. If I had to compare it to another camera I own and know, I would say the files have about the same amount of wiggle room in editing as the files from my Nikon D300, which is an APS-C camera from 2007. That is not really a compliment, especially looking at the price those cameras go for.
Noise is really like nothing I’ve seen so far. At ISO 100, you have almost no noise at all. Images are cleaner than even my full frame images at base ISO with plenty of light. But the moment you start ramping up a little bit, you find yourself with noise levels that are completely unhinged. I would personally not go above 800 ISO… and images are already pretty noisy there. Any higher and the only suitable way to use those images would be using black and white and embracing the grain, but even then you can’t go too high, or you’ll see banding coming in the shadows. Honestly, it’s not good. I would even say it’s pretty bad. And that’s not for a lack of testing or trying. You can shoot up to ISO 6400 but I honestly only tried it once and never touched that ISO value again…
For a point of reference, I do quite a lot of event photography currently, as well as local sports. My main camera to shoot all of that is a Nikon Z6 (which was released just a year after the SDQ). Most of the sports events I shoot are at night, and most of the social events / photojournalism I shoot is indoors and not very well lit. I find myself using ISOs north of 32000 more than I would like, but with some NR in post, the images are more than usable. I tried my best to make the SDQ-H images look great past 1600 ISO, but without using AI tools (which I don’t have access to yet), this is simply not possible. Banding really makes your life hard.
Basically what this means is that I really only used the SDQ-H for personal work, and always during the day. When the light was starting to go low, I always grabbed something else… That meant that in instances where I could not carry more than 1 camera, or I would want to carry a lighter kit, the SDQ-H would stay on the shelf at home.
There was really only one use case where the SDQ-H was the perfect tool for the job : slow paced landscape photography. The SFD mode (fancy name to say in camera bracketing) really made the camera whole, and I would argue that if you really wanted to have the best possible performance out of that camera, knowing how to use it is mandatory.
Of course, that will mean having to deal with the insufferable Sigma Photo Pro, which compared to more modern photo editing softwares like Lightroom or Capture One, is something that feels like it's coming straight from the Windows 98 era.
My workflow with SFD files was pretty simple : import the X3i file in SPP, convert it to a 16bit TIFF file, and then import that in Capture One for the main editing work. The less I use SPP, the better for my mental health.
You will probably not be super shocked to hear that I have been using 12bit DNG files for most of my time when I wasn’t using the SFD mode. I did some quick testing between the X3F and DNG files, and the difference in quality wasn’t obvious. I was okay dealing with the 120MBish files if that meant I didn’t have to deal with SPP.
Overall Performance:
I’m not going to lie, it isn’t great. The autofocus is probably the worst autofocus system I’ve ever used (mind you, I’m using a lot of older cameras, some that are close to 20 years old, and I’ve never had anything perform like that).
I didn’t have any kind of modern Art glass, so that probably impacted the camera’s ability to focus, but I often had false positives and overall the focus was very slow, to the point that it was simply faster to focus manually and check critical focus with the digital zoom.
Speaking of digital zoom, it’s also one of the worst I’ve seen. Not only do you lose a lot of resolution when zooming in the picture (that I can deal with), but the focus peaking isn’t super accurate (I ended up turning it off) and there is loads of rolling shutter, to the point that if you’re using an unstabilized lens, your image turns into jello land even if you’re on a tripod. It’s extremely jarring. You can get used to it, but man oh man was it distracting when shooting.
Burst is very much the same story : this is not a camera that was made to be able to shoot in bursts or to follow action. It’s fast enough to allow you to use the SFD mode effectively, and it can hold 7 shots in the buffer… which are the 7 required exposures for the SFD mode (again).
This is the most “slow paced photography” camera you can get on the market, short of getting some large format film camera.
Lenses:
I usually don’t talk about the lenses for the cameras I review, because this is generally not a problem. Either I can adapt a lot of stuff, or there is a lot of glass on the mount natively and I don’t have to worry about adapting (like on Canon EF or Nikon F).
The SA mount is a little bit of a trickier situation : sure, there are lenses available for that mount, and very good ones at that, but looking at the prices for used lenses always just steered me off buying another one. The SA mount is a very niche mount, and the price of those Sigma lenses compared to their F or EF equivalent is generally between +50 and +100% which is very frustrating to see. On top of that, the SDQ-H is a mirrorless camera but with a DSLR mount, so there is really not a lot of other mounts you can adapt to it (I was able to find an adapter for the M42 mount (everything else is hacky / destructive stuff, like adapting Pentax K mount lenses).
Also, if you end up going with SA lenses, and you want to carry them over to a mirrorless system, that basically means you are either locked in the L mount, or the Sony E mount. FOr me that shoots Nikon Z for example, I can’t share lenses between cameras.
I tried to adapt Nikon F mount lenses using a Nikon F - Pentax K adapter, but the adapter really degraded the quality (as you can see here ), and in the end I didn’t used it that much. Most of my time ended up being with my M42 glass or my 20-40mm f/2.8 in SA mount. Not a great lens wide open but sharp as a knife stopped down, enough for this sensor at least.
So yeah, if it was released a year later once Sigma joined the L-mount alliance, maybe we could have had a “true” mirrorless Foveon camera, with the ability to adapt any lens we wanted… But we are entering the “What if” territory now… Until the FFF I guess.
Extra notable features:
There are a few things that I really liked about the SDQ-H which no other camera I owned had :
View attachment 5f510d23874247aa8fbc4fb920952041.jpg
the 21:9 ratio was allowing me to frame in-camera images to be assembled later like this, which is quite satifying when printed
Conclusion:
The Sigma SD Quattro H is going to be a camera that I remember fondly for how nice it was to hold it and use it… The image quality was exceptional when the camera was used in the right conditions.
But the camera isn’t perfect, and has a little bit more drawbacks in my eyes than most other cameras. I’m not a pixel peeper, I generally don’t care about resolution that much. My general sweetspot resolution for my prints and posting is around 10/12MP. I already consider my 24MP cameras to be high resolution, so you must imagine that I didn’t get that camera for the resolution aspect (even though I admit that it is fun to play with).
I initially bought that camera for the sensor technology that intrigued me, and also for the colour reproduction of that camera (which didn’t turn out so great in the end for me).
It’s a camera that up until very recently, I would have not sold : I didn’t use it a lot (maybe 300/400ish pictures were taken in the last year with it) but it was special enough for me to feel like I needed to keep it. It’s not a very versatile camera at all, and it doesn’t always hit, but you can feel it when it does.
As I said in the introduction, I ended up selling it anyway, because I hate seeing cameras like these staying on a shal collecting dust. I guess that as much as I wanted to love it, it still wasn’t the camera for me.
--
(G.A.S. and collectionnite will get my skin one day)
For disclosure, I recently sold that camera, after owning it for about a year. Before I get sidetracked, let’s get into the different attributes of this camera and my opinion about it.
Build quality and ergonomics:
Overall very good, I would even say exceptional; this is probably the absolute best point about that camera : it’s built like a tank, feels like a magnesium alloy slab in your hands. The hand grip is deep, with nice grooves and covered in soft rubber-like plastic. The thumb-rest is very comfortable and overall really nice as far as thumb rests go. My only complaint about the hand placement on this camera is that the grip is a little short. I have large hands, and my pinkie was sometimes on the verge of falling under the grip. It didn’t happen really often, but it was a little too close for comfort.
It’s weather sealed all around, the battery door is spring loaded and has a twisting lock (which is my preferred way of locking a door on any camera), and the battery itself is held in place firmly by a plastic tab. Even if the door opens, the battery won’t fall. The SD card door is just as solid, and the camera is weather sealed all around. First time I see this on any camera : the lens mount on the camera has a rubber gasket to seal the mount, even if the lens you use doesn’t have any rubber gasket. I thought that was a clever design and I wish more brands would do this.
The dials are extremely nice to turn, they’re both made of high quality metal (I suppose aluminium?) with very satisfying clicks. Some of the nicest metal dials I’ve used on a camera for sure.
The buttons are not clicky, they have a soft bottom-out, but they have a lot of travel. I’m used to Nikon buttons which are similar but with a shorter travel and that’s my preference. They’re not perfect, but 100% usable.
There are a couple of switches on the camera, which are very firm : you won’t move them by accident (which is nice since I never had to move them the entire time I owned that camera).
Overall, the SDQ (H) is one of the best built cameras I’ve ever had the pleasure of handling. Its looks are a little bit weird, and the button placement is sometimes a little questionable (especially when it comes to the power button for example), but it was a nice handling experience through and through.
Displays:
When it comes to displays, this is very much the same story : the camera has a pretty good and bright back display which is very sharp. Looking at the black levels, I suppose this is an OLED panel, but I’m not 100% positive. The refresh rate is decent (though this doesn’t really matter with that camera as you’ll see later). Next to it is the info display, which on DSLRs you would traditionally find on the top panel of the camera. It is backlit, with the option to turn it off (when the backlight is off, the information is still displayed on it). It’s overall a pretty nice addition, especially when reviewing pictures, the sub display is showing the exposure parameters of the image displayed.
I wish I could be as positive about the EVF, alas it’s not a very good one. It’s not an OLED, but rather an LCD screen, so your black levels are absolutely not to the same levels as the back screen (and are dark grey rather than black). Colour accuracy is not the best either. Resolution could be higher considering the year of release and the price it was sold at (it’s 2.36M dots, not bad not terrible. A short year later cameras were already using 3.69M dot OLED panels and 2.36M dot OLED EVFs have been used since the early 2010s. The EVF in my 2014’ Fujifilm X-T1 is in a whole different class from the SDQ-H, despite costing a fraction of the cost on the used market and being 3 years older). Overall though, the EVF is usable : it allows you to frame your shot and focus accurately. You won’t be using it a whole lot though, I feel like I’ve been using the back panel a lot more than the EVF.
Image Quality:
This is the most important aspect of the SDQ-H : without high image quality this camera has no point existing. The first thing I’ll say is that when it comes to sharpness and colour rendition, this is probably one of the best, if not the best camera I’ve used. Micro-contrast is excellent on that sensor, and it’s the kind of feature giving you the “wow effect” when you first open the files in your editing software.
Colours are a little tricky to work with sometimes. They are pleasing to the eye when you look at them on the computer, but they rarely depict exactly the scene that it captured. When I was processing the files, it always took me more work to bring the Foveon images to where I wanted them to be compared to Bayer or X-Trans cameras that I own.
Sadly, this is where the positives end. As much as I appreciate the Foveon X3 technology, this is also full of compromises : both of them being high ISO noise performance and dynamic range.
Let’s start with the latter : the SDQ-H doesn’t have a ton of dynamic range. It’s usable, but it’s not anything worth bragging about. If I had to compare it to another camera I own and know, I would say the files have about the same amount of wiggle room in editing as the files from my Nikon D300, which is an APS-C camera from 2007. That is not really a compliment, especially looking at the price those cameras go for.
Noise is really like nothing I’ve seen so far. At ISO 100, you have almost no noise at all. Images are cleaner than even my full frame images at base ISO with plenty of light. But the moment you start ramping up a little bit, you find yourself with noise levels that are completely unhinged. I would personally not go above 800 ISO… and images are already pretty noisy there. Any higher and the only suitable way to use those images would be using black and white and embracing the grain, but even then you can’t go too high, or you’ll see banding coming in the shadows. Honestly, it’s not good. I would even say it’s pretty bad. And that’s not for a lack of testing or trying. You can shoot up to ISO 6400 but I honestly only tried it once and never touched that ISO value again…
For a point of reference, I do quite a lot of event photography currently, as well as local sports. My main camera to shoot all of that is a Nikon Z6 (which was released just a year after the SDQ). Most of the sports events I shoot are at night, and most of the social events / photojournalism I shoot is indoors and not very well lit. I find myself using ISOs north of 32000 more than I would like, but with some NR in post, the images are more than usable. I tried my best to make the SDQ-H images look great past 1600 ISO, but without using AI tools (which I don’t have access to yet), this is simply not possible. Banding really makes your life hard.
Basically what this means is that I really only used the SDQ-H for personal work, and always during the day. When the light was starting to go low, I always grabbed something else… That meant that in instances where I could not carry more than 1 camera, or I would want to carry a lighter kit, the SDQ-H would stay on the shelf at home.
There was really only one use case where the SDQ-H was the perfect tool for the job : slow paced landscape photography. The SFD mode (fancy name to say in camera bracketing) really made the camera whole, and I would argue that if you really wanted to have the best possible performance out of that camera, knowing how to use it is mandatory.
Of course, that will mean having to deal with the insufferable Sigma Photo Pro, which compared to more modern photo editing softwares like Lightroom or Capture One, is something that feels like it's coming straight from the Windows 98 era.
My workflow with SFD files was pretty simple : import the X3i file in SPP, convert it to a 16bit TIFF file, and then import that in Capture One for the main editing work. The less I use SPP, the better for my mental health.
You will probably not be super shocked to hear that I have been using 12bit DNG files for most of my time when I wasn’t using the SFD mode. I did some quick testing between the X3F and DNG files, and the difference in quality wasn’t obvious. I was okay dealing with the 120MBish files if that meant I didn’t have to deal with SPP.
Overall Performance:
I’m not going to lie, it isn’t great. The autofocus is probably the worst autofocus system I’ve ever used (mind you, I’m using a lot of older cameras, some that are close to 20 years old, and I’ve never had anything perform like that).
I didn’t have any kind of modern Art glass, so that probably impacted the camera’s ability to focus, but I often had false positives and overall the focus was very slow, to the point that it was simply faster to focus manually and check critical focus with the digital zoom.
Speaking of digital zoom, it’s also one of the worst I’ve seen. Not only do you lose a lot of resolution when zooming in the picture (that I can deal with), but the focus peaking isn’t super accurate (I ended up turning it off) and there is loads of rolling shutter, to the point that if you’re using an unstabilized lens, your image turns into jello land even if you’re on a tripod. It’s extremely jarring. You can get used to it, but man oh man was it distracting when shooting.
Burst is very much the same story : this is not a camera that was made to be able to shoot in bursts or to follow action. It’s fast enough to allow you to use the SFD mode effectively, and it can hold 7 shots in the buffer… which are the 7 required exposures for the SFD mode (again).
This is the most “slow paced photography” camera you can get on the market, short of getting some large format film camera.
Lenses:
I usually don’t talk about the lenses for the cameras I review, because this is generally not a problem. Either I can adapt a lot of stuff, or there is a lot of glass on the mount natively and I don’t have to worry about adapting (like on Canon EF or Nikon F).
The SA mount is a little bit of a trickier situation : sure, there are lenses available for that mount, and very good ones at that, but looking at the prices for used lenses always just steered me off buying another one. The SA mount is a very niche mount, and the price of those Sigma lenses compared to their F or EF equivalent is generally between +50 and +100% which is very frustrating to see. On top of that, the SDQ-H is a mirrorless camera but with a DSLR mount, so there is really not a lot of other mounts you can adapt to it (I was able to find an adapter for the M42 mount (everything else is hacky / destructive stuff, like adapting Pentax K mount lenses).
Also, if you end up going with SA lenses, and you want to carry them over to a mirrorless system, that basically means you are either locked in the L mount, or the Sony E mount. FOr me that shoots Nikon Z for example, I can’t share lenses between cameras.
I tried to adapt Nikon F mount lenses using a Nikon F - Pentax K adapter, but the adapter really degraded the quality (as you can see here ), and in the end I didn’t used it that much. Most of my time ended up being with my M42 glass or my 20-40mm f/2.8 in SA mount. Not a great lens wide open but sharp as a knife stopped down, enough for this sensor at least.
So yeah, if it was released a year later once Sigma joined the L-mount alliance, maybe we could have had a “true” mirrorless Foveon camera, with the ability to adapt any lens we wanted… But we are entering the “What if” territory now… Until the FFF I guess.
Extra notable features:
There are a few things that I really liked about the SDQ-H which no other camera I owned had :
- More aspect ratio as options : in addition to the 3:2 native ratio, 1:1 and 16:9 which most cameras have, there is also a 4:3, 6:7 and 21:9 ratio. Those aspect ratios were also applied to the RAW files, which is generally what I’m looking for.
View attachment 5f510d23874247aa8fbc4fb920952041.jpg
the 21:9 ratio was allowing me to frame in-camera images to be assembled later like this, which is quite satifying when printed
- Colour profiles applied to the RAW files : that’s also something that to my knowledge no other camera does : when applying a profile like monochrome, pretty much every other camera will give you a colour RAW file. Well, not the SDQ-H, as the Foveon sensor can become monochromatic through software, which is very nice. It gives really great black and white images as well.
- The ability to be converted to full spectrum photography within seconds, by removing the IR cut filter that stands right behind the lens mount. That allows you to have a camera for IR work (you just have to screw the IR pass - visible cut filter of your choice afterwards, and when you’re bored of it you just have to pop the hot mirror back in. Really neat feature, though I will admit I only used it once or twice : I’m really not interested much in IR photography, the few images I’ve captured in IR were black and white.
Conclusion:
The Sigma SD Quattro H is going to be a camera that I remember fondly for how nice it was to hold it and use it… The image quality was exceptional when the camera was used in the right conditions.
But the camera isn’t perfect, and has a little bit more drawbacks in my eyes than most other cameras. I’m not a pixel peeper, I generally don’t care about resolution that much. My general sweetspot resolution for my prints and posting is around 10/12MP. I already consider my 24MP cameras to be high resolution, so you must imagine that I didn’t get that camera for the resolution aspect (even though I admit that it is fun to play with).
I initially bought that camera for the sensor technology that intrigued me, and also for the colour reproduction of that camera (which didn’t turn out so great in the end for me).
It’s a camera that up until very recently, I would have not sold : I didn’t use it a lot (maybe 300/400ish pictures were taken in the last year with it) but it was special enough for me to feel like I needed to keep it. It’s not a very versatile camera at all, and it doesn’t always hit, but you can feel it when it does.
As I said in the introduction, I ended up selling it anyway, because I hate seeing cameras like these staying on a shal collecting dust. I guess that as much as I wanted to love it, it still wasn’t the camera for me.
--
(G.A.S. and collectionnite will get my skin one day)
