DK's ramblings - Cameracraft

David and Goliath? Nikon D4 dwarfs NEX-7!

Posted on April 3, 2012 By David Kilpatrick

Side by side on my light table (which collapses with a ‘pop’ when sixteen tons of Nikon is placed on it), and the NEX-7 is given the foreground role to avoid any accusations of using perspective to make it look tiddly.

I’m writing some reviews of the Nikon and other new professional DSLRs for the British Journal, so I won’t say anything about the Nikon’s rather wonderful 16 megapixel full frame sensor or its stunning low light performance. I hope when Nikon read my reports they’ll decide to send me to photograph in the Arctic Circle in December – there would be plenty of light for this beast.

This picture won’t be going to the BJP. I like it because these are equivalents. The Nikon’s 28-300mm VR is admittedly f/5.6 at the long end (and a vast amount better than any Sigma or Tamron 28-300mm or 18-200mm yet made). But otherwise, these are zooms with the same range of angle, both stabilised, both very quiet in both focusing and IS action, both very well-made.

And the cameras are both a real pleasure to use and produce 100% professional results. The difference is that if I stick the NEX-7 combo under my coat, I do not look like a shoplifter or terrorist with a concealed weapon of mass-perturbation.

Watch out for our NEX-7 review soon. I’m not hurrying and it may be a month or more.

– David Kilpatrick

Cameras (DSLR), DK's ramblings, NEX System

hireacamera.com invest in Alpha and NEX gear!

Posted on March 28, 2012 By David Kilpatrick

The UK’s top camera and lens hire company, hireacamera.com, has invested in a whole new stock of Sony Alpha and NEX gear right up to the 500mm G – their A77s come with 16-50mm SSMs… here, Guy Thatcher explains their enthusiasm for Sony, filmed at the PhotoVision Roadshow in Edinburgh on Tuesday March 27th.

It’s a 1080p HD video shot on the NEX-7 by David Kilpatrick with no accessories apart from the Tamron 18-200mm DiIII VC zoom, which at one point displays a preference for focusing on the better lit, more contrasty background.

Cameras (DSLR), DK's ramblings, HD Video, Lenses - Alpha Mount, News, NEX System

Minolta 70-210mm f4 versus Canon 70-200mm f4 L IS

Posted on March 24, 2012 By David Kilpatrick

The Canon 5D MkIII arrived, but I will not be reporting on that here – it is with me for a British Journal review, and that will take a little time and will also be exclusive to the BJP in print and on iPad App. So no sneak preview anywhere else!

However, with the camera came a 70-200mm f4 Canon L IS lens. This month I picked up a very cheap 70-210mm f4 Minolta AF – the ‘beercan’ original from 1985 which has a broken lens hood, the wrong lens cap (why the hood got broken) and a slightly rough focusing travel that tends to get locked into a near or far range without having a limiter.

So, since the loaner 70-200mm from Canon was in an equally well-used state, and the question keeps being asked whether the old Minolta is a match for it, I thought I would A-B the two lenses with the Canon on the new 5D MkIII and the beercan on the Alpha 900.

I call this comparison ‘can o’beer versus a yard of L’ for reasons the product size comparison should make clear:

Of course a lot of this is the Canon lens hood (anyone with a flair for geometry will spot that the narrower, shorter Minolta hood is nearly as effective, just draw a diagonal from front left to rear right of the hood to see why). And the Canon has IS built in, as well as a focus range limiter. During operation the Canon was rather noisy, making a constant whispering sound from the IS even though the USM focusing was silent. The Minolta of course zips and clunks into focus, but is otherwise silent, and the A900 in-body stabilisation did not make anything like the same level of operating noise as the in-lens IS.

Although there is no doubt the Minolta lens is less sensitive to AF commands (if that’s the best way to put it) actual targeting a new focus point and locking on seems every bit as fast. It’s nowhere near as good as the Canon at continuous AF subject tracking, but the Canon was nowhere near as good as the Minolta/Alpha combo at user-targeted aim and focus operations. The Canon spent a lot of time being out of focus and then rapidly refocusing, with my moving targets (backyard hens, if you have them you’ll know what perfect focus test subjects they provide). The Minolta spent time staying focused and not responding much.

Reviewing the results, I can only say the Alpha/beercan combo had a better success rate. Nearly all the shots were critically sharp where a good few Canon shots either didn’t get enough IS to combat shake, or maybe the IS was actually taking the edge off sharpness. This applied particularly at closer distances, where the Minolta (210mm, front group focus and 1.1m focus distance) seemed much better than the Canon (200mm, internal focus and 1.2m minimum).

For this article, I have made 2000 pixel wide reductions from my test images. These are within the 2MB limit at high quality for images within the site. Subscribers to photoclubalpha can also access hi-res full sized images (over 70MB in total, so beware) through an additional page link provided at the end of this report.

The tree and twigs test

Our big old holly tree provides a suitably evil subject for any lens with chromatic fringe or purple fringe issues. I shot everything raw; no lens profiles were used, the conversion was done using Adobe Camera Raw 6.7Beta. Like Lightroom 4, this offers automatic analysis of CA even without requiring lens profiles. In fact, adjustable CA is entirely disabled – gone. I can tell you it works amazingly well. Lenses which have been very difficult to clean up are fixed. It isn’t even one-click – just set ‘Remove CA’ as a default, and that is it, for all lenses, for ever.

I used the tree for hand-held (with stabilisation) ISO 100 tests at f/4, f/5.6 and f/8.

I thought the beercan would be bad for fringes and CA. On the Alpha 900, it simply wasn’t. The full aperture image was surprisingly clean. The Canon lens on the MkIII actually showed more colour fringing. Both cleaned up in ACR 6.7b. As for sharpness, it seemed to me to be a draw. I picked a 3D target to avoid slight front of back focus differences influencing the result.

Above – Canon at 70mm and f/4 – click image to open 2000 pixel wide version

Above – Minolta at 70mm and f/4 (same applies, to all these example)

Above – Canon at f/5.6

Above – Minolta at f/5.6

Above – Canon at f/8 (for the f/8 images, the ACR conversion was cut by -0.30 EV exposure, as I felt both cameras had predictably overexposed a little, but the wider apertures were left this way as it emphasises any CA – since f/8 is an optimum aperture with cameras of this resolution, I aimed for the best straight conversions)

Above – Minolta at f/8.

Long end tests, moving and static, medium to close

A range of different subjects ended up being shot on both cameras in the garden. I was, at the same time, shooting various tests on Fuji X10 and Pentax Optio WG-2. If that Pentax could shoot raw files it would be a real winner because the lens is lovely! When you start poking small cameras one or two cm away from small flowers, you realise how limiting the larger format and longer lenses can be.

But the small cameras could not catch a single decent snap of hens scratching around as I worked. They move too fast and just the focus lag along, let alone the shutter lag, stops even the best compact or pocket digitals from being useful.

Here’s a Canon shot. I took half a dozen similar shots with both cameras, slightly varying in distance and with two different hens, at f/5.6 and also some at f/8, all at maximum focal length. It would be hard to say the Canon was better as the success rate was lower. It seemed to focus faster but not as accurately, with both cameras set just to use the centre sensor (as the overall frame compositions tell you).

This is 50% of original pixel scale. Click the image for a 1200 pixel square, 100% clip view.

Here’s an Alpha 900 shot with the Minolta at the same settings, ISO 320 RAW, exactly the same ACR 6.7b parameters used (25, 0.5, 25, 0 Sharpening; 20, 25, 0, 25, 50 L and C NR; strong contrast curve; black point 0; Adobe Standard colour calibration; CA Correction enabled with Defringe Highlights but no Lens Profile; both with exposure dropped by -0.3EV, no other change to defaults).

Again, if you click this 50% view you get a 1200 pixel square clip. Remember, no web or print sharpening is applied. The red hen is a little lower in contrast but so is the Minolta lens, I think, and so is the Alpha 900 default rendering – the 5D MkIII either has less dynamic range, or processes with a steeper curve to the raw. Or Adobe simply applies more contrast to the Canon raw ‘under the hood’.

These pictures are at 1/320th for the Canon, 1/200th for the Alpha – anything less than 1/200th and hens move their heads so fast you don’t stand a chance of a sharp image. Aperture priority auto.

Close-up ability

I find the small difference between 1.1m and 210mm, and 1.2m and 200mm, significant. This is a recurring theme for me. Around 1m, differences of 10 or 20cm either way in minimum focus distance are critical. They can make the difference between working at arm’s length, within reach, or out of reach. My perfect close-up situation allows me to reach a hand out and adjust a subject, so I really like lenses which focus down to 60cm or so. I also like to be able to place my lens against glass, or right up to wires, to get shots through windows and barriers. A classic example would be a small animal in a wire zoo cage. If your lens won’t focus closer than say 1.5m, often you can’t place it up to the wire and therefore you can’t get the shot and blur the wire out. But if the lens focuses down to say 0.9m you can. So for me, any gain at all in minimum focus distance is good. I’m not keen on the way Sony’s SAM versions of once-screw-drive lenses generally lose a bit of close focus range.

Here are the results of the Canon and the Minolta at their closest focus-confirmed setting. I used ISO 320, and f/11, hand-held with stabilisation.

Again, if you click this image you will get a 2000 pixels high version. The Canon colour – or maybe the Auto White Balance – is better than the Alpha shot which follows. It may be down to lens colour transmission, as the 1985 Minolta glass is yellower than the Canon. I measured the transmission using a Kenko Color Meter (the new version of the classic Minolta Colormeter IIIF). The Minolta is roughly 5Y+5G and would need a 5B+5M filter pack to match the Canon lens transmission.

Here’s the Minolta lens shot, closer because of the 1.1m focus and 210mm focal length:

Again, clicking on the image will get you to a 2000 pixel high size.

These close-ups had me really thinking. I had to go back and check the settings. I can assure you the pix really are from a distance of 10cm apart – I did not move, I just squatted back a bit with the Canon; the lenses were at 200mm and 210mm; the apertures were both f/11, both cameras were at ISO 320, both gave the same 1/160th exposure. Yet just study the bokeh (differential focus) of the Minolta images. Look at the thickness of the blurred dry plant stem crossing upper right in the background. Look at the green leaf behind the hyacinth. Study the larger version for the focus point in each case (it’s comparable). The beercan just seems so much better able to separate out the subject from the background, without losing depth of field within the flower. Yet if you look through the two lenses from the back element end, wide open, the Canon appears to have a huge aperture by comparison – a really wide exit pupil.

Does it all prove anything?

So, what do I conclude? Well, I know from many years of using the 70-210mm that it can benefit from an even deeper hood, maybe on the scale of the Canon. It’s not a contrasty lens, and it can get some serious internal reflection – big flare patches, even veiling the entire frame. And on some earlier cameras even APS-C size, my earlier examples of this lens had been prone to very strong purple fringes. But I have never had an unsharp example and some of our best, sharpest digital shots have come from the classic 70-210mm beercan.

I’ve already been finding just what a transformation Adobe’s Camera Raw 6.7 beta (release candidate) makes with its auto analysis of the image to apply CA removal. Distortion and vignetting just aren’t significant issues with tele zooms of this type, so full lens profiles are hardly needed (and they are very difficult to make, you need a working distance most studios or homes do not contain).

Using this rather beaten-up example makes me think that it would be good, again, to find a mint condition little used one. It is a lens with interesting properties; it is a true zoom, and a constant aperture, which means that if you lock the focus down and shoot video you can zoom without losing sharpness (many modern ‘zooms’ are varifocal not parfocal, and shift focus as you zoom) and without any aperture jumps (only constant aperture lenses offer you this).

Most of all, comparing this lens with the relatively expensive and much larger Canon it’s clear that the performance is either equal, or better. Take into account advances in coatings, and the effects of age on any lens, and I would have to think a new version of exactly this same Minolta lens would be stunningly sharp and ideal within the Alpha system. It would be a perfect companion for the 16-50mm, or 24-70mm, on APS-C or full frame.

Full size images for subscribers only

If you are a registered subscriber to photoclubalpha, you can go to our download page for this article, and get the full size (JPEG quality 10, sRGB) images for all the shots here except the chicken pix which are already available clipped as 100% views. It is very interesting to study the twigs at the extremes of the 70mm shots from both lenses, look at the level of colour-fringe induced tinting to out of focus details, and affirm that the legendary status of the ‘beercan’ may indeed be deserved.

And, as a final point, though I am sure the Canon will win me over in low light situations and many other ways, these tests certainly proved that the Alpha 900 has not been made obsolete by almost four years of progress.

– David Kilpatrick

Cameras (DSLR), DK's ramblings, Lenses - Alpha Mount

A57 – no GPS

Posted on March 13, 2012 By David Kilpatrick

A57 announced today does what was needed and updates the A55 to have a decent EVF, plus a few bells and whistles. It’s got a 77-style microphone, and also a mic input socket for external mic moved to a better position than the A55. It has full 1080/50p video capability, 12 fps burst mode (with the usual restrictions and more*), a 15-point 3-cross AF sensor like the A65.

This camera is not an A55 body revision – it uses the NP-FM500H battery, the larger size found in the earlier A5xx-series Alphas and the A77/65. This should give it far more shots (well, OK, 550) per charge than the smaller ’50’ size battery used by the NEX and A55/33/35 etc. Sony’s new accessories include an LED video light, HVL-LE1. The rear screen is similar to the 55, reversible to the body (one of the major points missing from the NEX-7, which cries out to be configurable that way but can’t be).

Exposure bracketing remains limited to the inexplicable and disappointing 1/3 or 2/3 (0.7EV) steps and just three frames, so for HDR you are obliged to work manually or use the camera’s JPEG-only function.

*You only get 12fps in the ‘tele-zoom’ mode which is effectively a 2X crop to a mere 4 megapixel image, optimistically interpolated up by Sony in-camera to create a redundantly oversized not quite sharp enough JPEG in ‘tele-zoom’ mode. Otherwise, you get the usual and impressive 8fps regular and 10fps ‘advance priority’ modes, plus a 3fps Lo speed.

But they have dropped GPS, unless someone has managed to miss it out from the specs. Oh well. Not that interested now. Disappointing. Potentially much improved travel camera – one I would prefer to the Alpha 77 for size, weight, and sensor – turned into a family camera with some neat joke functions like automatically cropping portraits and then blowing up the cropped area to 16 megapixels. This uses face recognition, a variation of the tele-zoom kludge, and what could be a very annoying Rule of Thirds composition adjustment – at least it also saves the original file with the face/s placed where you intended. The best thing about features like these is that you can turn then off, the worst thing is that Sony probably think this is more useful than GPS.

Available end of April, and we shall be rushing out to avoid this model and wait for the next bus to arrive. Everyone has been saying – we’d love an A77 or even an A65 with the 16 megapixel sensor. Or we’d love an A55 upgraded with the better viewfinder. So what do Sony deliver? Neither…

Hopefully I should have put ‘yet?’ after that last remark.

– DK

Cameras (DSLR), DK's ramblings, News

The EVF future

Posted on March 12, 2012 By David Kilpatrick

At photokina 2010, Paul Genge from Sony pretty much told me that Sony’s future lay in the EVF (translucent mirror or otherwise, Electronic View Finder) models. He was not able to say anything firm. Since then, I’ve spoken to him on several occasions and he has repeated that Sony left all options open but the EVF design was likely to be the way ahead. What he has not said directly to me is that conventional SLR design – Optical View Finder – was off the roadmap.

EVF does away with the need for the finder to be positioned anywhere near the optical axis. Noses can safely hit thin air not a rear screen. Unless you are left eyed. NEX-7 with ocular surround fitted.

Although Sony did not attend Focus on Imaging 2012, the UK website TechRadar secured an interview statement during Focus week, in which Paul appears to have confirmed without ambiguity that the future was EVF-only, and that the forthcoming full frame successor to the Alpha 900 would be an SLT-EVF design. At the same time, we learn that the 70-200mm SSM G and 70–400mm SSM G lens are to be revised for 2013.

We know, from several sources, that Sony is not currently making all its lenses – even the high end ones – in one facility, or in its own workshops. I believe the 70-400mm SSM G is a contracted-out design and that the 70-300mm SSM G has always been made by a third party lensmaker. This is nothing new; the Minolta 100-400mm APO was patented by Tokina and sold to Minolta as an exclusive (no-one else got the lens) and the same company made some if not all the 100-300mm APO lenses. Using different sources means that various types of coating are appearing; traditional Minolta style – the multi achromatic coating, Carl Zeiss T*, Tamron’s BBAR-derived coatings, some Sony multicoatings of unknown pedigree on Chinese SAM lenses, and a new water and oil resistant coating due to be used for the revised 70-200mm and 70-400mm.

This coating is nearly always combined with weather or splash proof design, and companies which have the ability to apply it include Hoya (Tokina, Kenko, Marumi, Pentax), Olympus, Canon, Nikon, and Sigma. Sigma is very significant as they have installed new coating lines recently and they are going through a bit of a subcontracting boom. Their facilities are all in Japan, they are on high ground and were slightly affected by the earthquake but not by the tsunami. They have a long history of building lenses and cameras for Leica, Carl Zeiss, Panasonic, Olympus, Canon/Kodak and interchangeable lenses for nearly all the major names.

If the high end tele zooms are to be revised, weatherproofing and the new coating will certainly arrive along with a synchronisation of lens appearance and finish. But I’m willing to bet something else is involved. The SSM focus system is only partially suitable for contrast-detect operation. It works, on static subjects, but unless some major advance is made in CD-AF it’s lacking the refinement and speed of the AF found in SEL (native Sony NEX) lenses. I’ve tested the 70-400mm on the LA-EA1 with NEX-7, I can work with the lens comfortably on most subjects and the camera is very good at refusing to take the shot until focus is 100% locked.

All that just to get 2X the magnification – NEX-7 with LA-EA1 and 70-400mm SSM G (an operational kit, if not fast) compared to Tamron 18-200mm NEX lens with the correct type of contrast-detection friendly focus motor and protocols.

What Sony must surely want to do is dispose of the SLT (‘translucent’) pellicle mirror and the Phase Detection AF module. It makes most sense to focus, meter, view and expose from one single sensor. In order to do so, lens focus motors need a slightly different control protocol. SSM lenses are already CD-AF compatible, as are SAM onboard focus motor lenses, but they don’t match the NEX system SEL lenses. Sigma HSM and Tamron USD Alpha mount lenses are not CD-AF compatible and do not work correctly on the LA-EA1 adaptor. Upgrading matters most with tele lenses, and they are also most likely to be used in adverse weather for wildlife, news or sports. So my guess is that the upgrade to these lenses will be comprehensive and that it will look forward to possible Sony Alpha bodies with either no SLT mirror, or a movable SLT mirror and choice between PD-AF and CD-AF.

As for the EVF itself, it’s one stage away from being better than a very good optical finder on balance of qualities. Unlike optical finders, the EVF is not susceptible to user eyesight error (incorrect dioptre correction, combined with eye focusing accommodation) and presents the user with a low resolution but otherwise very accurate view of the image focused on the sensor. It can do this at light levels where optical finders become difficult to use, while also presenting a review of the captured image if desired – ‘shot success’ confirmation.

Differences between the ‘identical’ EVF of the NEX-5n accessory finder FDA-EV1S and the NEX-7 fixed built-in version are mostly down to the difference between the 16 megapixel generation 2 sensor, and the 24 megapixel. Response speed, low light noise, quality of colour and contrast are all influenced more by the two very different sensors. User observations that one is better or worse than the other will nearly always be down to this, and variations in settings between the two cameras compared.

There are things you can do on an EVF, such as magnifying a focus point well away from the centre, which simply can’t be done at all with an optical finder and may not always be convenient to do on a rear screen. The fact that EVFs permit eye-level video shooting, and that video is now a permanent feature of the Alpha class of camera from entry to semiprofessional, makes the EVF design change more inevitable.

Paul Genge had a short exchange of information with me when I was considering selling my Alpha 900 and all my frame Alpha lenses (after starting to use the A77). He said I’d regret selling my good full frame lenses when I replaced my Alpha 900 with a full frame model I would just not believe. His message was ‘you wait – you’ll not regret it’. So, I sold my old Minolta-era full frame lenses and bought myself a brand new 28-75mm f/2.8 SAM, Sony 50mm f/1.4 (replacing Minolta vintage), a 24mm f/2 Carl Zeiss SSM, and a 70-400mm SSM G. I kept the Alpha 900 and a few lenses I like which are unique in their function, such as the Samyang 85mm f/1.4 manual, the Sigma 70mm f/2.8 Macro, the Sigma 12-24mm and an old 16mm f/2.8 full frame fisheye. Instead of getting out of full frame, I re-invested in it.

I’m expecting the Alpha 900 replacement to be either an SLT design like a scaled-up A77 with 36 megapixels, or a second generation hybrid SLT design with a mirror you can raise to use CD-AF or manual live focusing. I’m hoping that it will appear with a new 28-75mm, 24-70mm or better midrange f/2.8 with improved SSM, weatherproofing and new coatings like the 16-50mm f/2.8 DT.

– David Kilpatrick

Cameras (DSLR), DK's ramblings, NEX System

Creep no more! The LensBand.

Posted on March 11, 2012 By David Kilpatrick

Though their website shows a very different way of using this theme park wristband repurposed – the LensBand anti zoom creep device – it just happens to fit many Sony zooms perfectly without stretching it into position to lock barrel to collar.

By fitting the LensBand exactly over the joint between the zoom ring and static lens barrel, you can create a much smoother damped zoom action and prevent the zoom from tromboning when carried, or creeping during long exposures when the camera is angled up or down. This issue is not tackled by stabilisation and very small amounts of zoom creep can affect exposures as short as 1/30th without your realising. You don’t get why the zoom appears to be not so sharp – that’s because you do not realise you, or gravity, have caused a tiny shift in focal length during the exposure.

These silicone rubber bands are not expensive, and they can also be used to provide extra grip on zoom or focusing rings. We chose two colours as the best for Sony Alpha – orange and black! At the end of this article you’ll find a link to our associates at The Photostore (Adrian, for a decade the manager of the Minolta Club) who have both these wonderful rubbery colours in stock.

Here’s Mr Orange fitted to a very first batch 16-80mm CZ zoom which has become slack enough to extend itself when strapdangled. By positioning the band centrally over the seam, leaving the focal lengths just visible and the focusing window clear, the lens is transformed. The zoom action becomes super-smooth and the lens does not shift at all. The elasticity of the LensBand is 100% perfect for this zoom. You can yank it over the back of the zoom ring closer to the camera, at one side, to increase the lock effect but in practice this position works full time. It locks, and prevents creep, and also radically improves the feel of the lens zoom.

As you can see, it also looks pretty funky and matches the orange lens not-a-seal-just-a-decoration bit on the Alpha 55 mount.

But for a Sigma 70-300mm Apo Macro – one of our favourite lenses despite past histories of stripped gears, since no other lens does the same thing in terms of focus range and pure sharpness – the black band looked better. This time, the fit is a little tighter but the band forms a cone shape gripping between zoomring and barrel. It prevents the rather slack zoom of a brand new 70-300mm Siggy from causing havoc. Between 150 and 250mm, this zoom will tend to self-extend if aimed downward (or collapse back when tracking those same old BIFs and airshow targets beloved of dPreview boringphoto posters!).

You can see that this new band collected dust and skinbits instantly – it really doesn’t matter if you have just spent 15 minutes in a bath, the human body sheds a couple of million sensor dust specks every hour and your fingers are a magnet for silicone rubber. Black always looks worse – the orange band stands up to our macro lens photography a bit better.

The band bridges a fatter zoom ring to a narrow diameter lens barrel. This still works. By moving the band just 1mm either way, the tension or damping effect on the zoom can be controlled precisely. This particular lens was improved 200% in feel by fitting the band. It was also made usable on a tripod when aimed down or up.

Well, there it is. Could not really be a simpler concept (we’ve done it with fat rubber bands – one Photoclubalpha member reports using a band found holding together a bunch of broccoli). But these robust, one-size-fits-all-except-tiny-microfourthirds LensBand alternatives are clearly a better choice.

No, they don’t fit the 70-400mm SSM G. For that you need the inner tube of a hobbit bicycle tyre, or perhaps a couple of sand eels knotted together. Or one big one in the fashion of the Worm Orobouros. One day, we’ll tackle that; at the moment, our 70-400mm SSM G is solid enough not to slip. Another really rocksolid lens seems to the 16-105mm Sony SAL zoom, lovely firm action; and the Tamron 18-200mm E for NEX feels like it won’t get loose for years.

You find the LensBand for sale all over the place, but in UK, for orange and black, visit:

www.photostore-uk.com

Adrian Paul also has loads of small accessories and he can get almost ANY Sony Alpha part or product to order – faster than most retailers. He is an authorised Sony Alpha supplier and has 25 years plus in-depth knowledge of the system.

For worldwide orders, B&H in the USA stocks all the colours, even the ugly ones which look nice on Canon lenses!

Accessories - 3rd party, DK's ramblings, Equipment Reviews

Using Adobe Bridge/ACR for ‘film looks’ controlled by your Alpha

Posted on February 5, 2012 By David Kilpatrick

It’s now easy enough to find camera profiles – image looks created by independent photographers, as Adobe and Sony do not provide any – which make a big difference to raw processing using Adobe Camera Raw or Lightroom. There are also many fine adjustments you can make within these programs, able to customise the image output so that it either looks just like an in-camera JPEG of a chosen picture style, or like nothing you can produce in-camera.

Many users wonder, sometimes, why their raw pictures viewed in Adobe Bridge look different from in-camera JPEGs. Sometimes they look identical but then after working for a while and fine-tuning your preferences, you see big differences between the two if you shoot RAW+JPEG. This is in addition to differences which can happen if you set the camera to shoot in sRGB (useful for the JPEG) but your computer to save as AdobeRGB (superior in many ways for raw conversions intended to be printed).

In ACR/Bridge, you can choose as a Preference whether to build fast thumbnails or high quality, and whether to build full screen previews or accept whatever is embedded in the file. If you do not set the preference to build high quality previews and thumbs, what you see in the thumbnails is normally an embedded JPEG which is part of the raw file and an exact match to an in-camera JPEG even if you don’t save one of these. What you see in the larger preview pane will depend on your screen size, the camera, and the type of raw but for nearly all modern DSLRs on laptops the basic quality option will show the embedded JPEG and you will even be able to zoom it without interpreting the raw data.

If, on the other hand, you set your Bridge prefs to large size and high quality previews using a large screen such as an iMac 27″, and you have ACR/PS/CS5/Elements installed, Bridge will access the ACR engine behind the scenes and will render your raw files. It creates a ‘cache’ of full screen size JPEG files (which will eventually use a lot of disk space) which exactly reflect the settings for any given camera/ISO default. You have the choice, in Preferences, between having a single Default for each camera or a different Default for every single ISO increment on each camera. If you set the ISO specific Default, the conversion used to build the preview/thumb will be exactly the settings you have saved for that ISO. See below where I repeat this all again for emphasis.

The 100% and full screen fast forward keystrokes

Bridge/ACR will render the full sized 100% view of the raw using saved default settings if you used the Loupe (a small section only) or the very useful sequence of: press space bar = show the full screen preview; mouse-click with the cursor at any point on this to zoom in to 100%; scroll round using controls/mouse; magnify 200%, 400%, or 800% using scroll-wheel or Apple Magic Mouse finger-touch; return to Bridge browsing using space bar. Be warned that even with a fast machine, Bridge builds the sharpness of your enlarged view (normally 100%) in stages.

What you first see may look a bit soft, wait two seconds and it will get sharper, another two seconds and it will be transformed to pixel-perfect rendering. Never judge a Bridge/ACR 100% or loupe view the instant you access it. Bridge/ACR is clever enough for you to be able to go to the magnified view with one shot, and using your arrow keys move to exactly the same position in your other shots at the same view. You can, by this means, compare sharpness in a set of shots. Once each has rendered for that point in the shot, the cache makes sure you can go back and forth between images faster, they do not need to render again.

But it’s Bridge Camera Raw Preferences which hides the great feature I’m telling you about here – a tip which can enable to you use the lower, manual-only set ISO values of some Alpha cameras like the new 77 to ‘load’ different ‘raw’ films just by changing the ISO setting. Or indeed, other camera makes which have similar ISO control.

Different raw conversions can be made specific to exact ISO settings, so that if you select a given setting, its unique conversion will automatically be used and its effect will be shown in the preview and thumbnail created.

This would be a disaster for Auto ISO – but the Alpha 77 has six different ISO settings between 50 and 160 which are NEVER used by Auto ISO, and can safely be used for my tip here. Also, there’s really not a great deal of difference between the noise, sharpness, and dynamic range of ISO setting with this low range. They are all very good.

ISO-specific default magic

So, I have an Alpha 77 with ISO settings 50, 64, 80, 100, 125, 160 all of which are very low noise and good quality. In Bridge/ACR, I can decide that ISO 50 will be used the Vivid camera profile, strong contrast curve, a certain degree of capture sharpening, a certain black point and so on. I can adjust all this until I think that ISO 50 looks just like Velvia film. Then I save the new default.

Taking a frame set to ISO 64, I can make a default which I think looks like Kodachrome 64 perhaps using the Landscape profile. For 80, I might decide to make a fake infra-red process default with added grain, monochrome conversion and contrast effects. For ISO 100, a default which is standard and looks like a good neutral colour slide. For 125, maybe an FP4 in acutance developer printed on G4 paper mono; for 160, a Portrait profile combined with no sharpening, to imitate Vericolor Type S or Fujicolor 160N.

The examples below do not use different ISOs, I have used one raw file to show the differences, of course!

‘Standard’ – this is the colour, contrast and profile used when Adobe Standard is set as ‘Camera Raw Default’ in Bridge on the Alpha 77. This default includes WB As Shot, Exposure as shot (0), no Recovery, no Fill, Black point 5, Brightness 50, Contrast 25, Clarity/Saturation/Vibrance all at 0, Medium tone curve.

This is the same overall conversion, using a profile called ‘Neutral’ designed to be similar to the camera’s Neutral JPEG setting.

This is a profile called ‘Vivid’, again with no other adjustments.

This is an interesting custom profile called ‘Positive Film’ which clearly has some major adjustments.

This is ‘Standard’ (not the Adobe Standard) but with multiple adjustments saved in the Default – Brightness to 75, Clarity to 25, Saturation and Vibrance both to 20, Strong contrast curve. This Default is a custom one which I prefer for many shots where good saturation and midtone brightness is needed. In fact, many Alpha 77 users advise changing the ACR default Brightness from 50 to 75 permanently as the 50 figure used by Adobe appears to make the images flat and dark.

This custom high contrast ‘red filtered’ mono conversion includes strong lens vignetting added (by moving correction sliders to zero) and a greyscale rendering controlled using the Hue/Saturation/Luminance control tab for colour balance. Blue, Aqua and Purple values have been lowered and Red and Orange values raised to imitate a camera filter on panchromatic film.

If you have not found and installed any third-party profiles, you can instead make detailed adjustments including contrast and saturation for much the same effects.

I am fully aware of the ‘well I can do all this in Photoshop‘ response, the point is that all these and other far more complex processes (including any of the raw conversion Presets found in popular styling packages by Marcus Bell, onOne and others) can be effectively assigned to one chosen ISO setting in the ‘protected from Auto’ range 50-160 on the Alpha 77.

Now, when I open my folder of raw of images in Bridge set to create High Quality thumbs and large previews, they can all get exactly my customised process treatment for the thumbnails depending on the ISO I have set. One image might appear with the b/w process above and the next with colour. I will be able to preselect a different Bridge preview and a different startpoint ACR process just by selecting a different ISO on the camera. I can leave ACR’s default settings in place from 200 and up, so I will never get Auto ISO producing strange differences from one frame to the next due to Bridge/ACR presets. Yes, I did once set some different conversions for specific ISOs in the Auto range and it really messed up by image selection – I found I had increased brightness for 320 but not for 400 (etc) so my exposures seemed to go all over the place when Auto ISO chanced to pick small changes from one shot to the next.

You can apply more NR and sharpening control to ISO 200 to 12800 as needed – and again, this will automatically be applied according to the ISO, to the preview and thumb as well as the opened raw for conversion. But it won’t look odd as the exposure, colour and contrast will remain constant.

Pros and cons

If you want to revert to a standard single process for all ISO settings, you’ll lose the customisation of Bridge/ACR but you can save each setting as a Camera Raw Default process (named) and restore the settings at any time. Or, you can just reserve one careful combo for a single ISO setting such as 80 and only set this when the specific result is wanted, leaving every other setting at factory default.

It only applies to one camera body at a time, you would need to set up the same defaults for every different similar body you use – and not all Alpha bodies offer the useful 1/3rd step ISO increments and low ISO range which make the idea practical. But, this is also an advantage, because if you process files from another camera of the same exact model it will be unaffected unless you set it up. Camera Raw Defaults can be set as specific to each serial numbered body, and each different ISO, so there is never any need for someone else’s raw files to be accidentally altered by your own personal setup.

Profiles

I use a set of Alpha profiles I have assembled from as many sources as possible, but mainly from Maurizio Piraccini’s development for every KM/Sony Alpha camera:

http://www.piraccini.net/2011/02/profili-colore-sony-a900-per-adobe-lr.html

These are also linked to via a Photoclubalpha Forum thread:

http://www.photoclubalpha.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=6&p=66090#p66090

To read a Forum thread about ‘Deep’ profiles (which is mainly about noise levels, not about the image looks themselves, but includes instructions on how to install all similar profiles) go to:

http://www.photoclubalpha.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=32&t=5786&p=60905

These threads contain links to profiles provided or sourced by Agorabasta as a forum contributor including some for most makes.

If you have any sources for other sets of created profiles, for any Alpha models, please add a Comment at the end of this post, and provide the link (crediting the source or the author if you have that information).

You read it here first – and you’ll never forget how this can be used. Lightroom offers the same functions and preferences. Other programs may follow suit. Now you can use your manual ISO settings for raw files just the same way you can apply picture styles to in-camera JPEGs, and get the results in ACR/Lightroom – no need to be restricted to Sony Image Data Converter to read tags.

– David Kilpatrick

Cameras (DSLR), DK's ramblings, Photo Techniques

The end of Kodak? Shades of Minolta…

Posted on January 20, 2012 By David Kilpatrick

Having written this piece tonight, I find myself deciding to put it on Photoclubalpha although it’s not Sony or Minolta related. The websites I run for professionals are seen by very few people, this is seen by 40,000 in a decent month. Therefore, you have a truly diverted article (with pictures taken on Sony and Minolta) – David Kilpatrick

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Photograph by and © Shirley Kilpatrick/Alpha 580, Sigma 18-250mm OS

Those who say ‘Kodak is dead’ are reacting a little prematurely. The US Chapter 11 filing for protection from bankruptcy has no equivalent in Britain, and allows time for revenues to be garnered which can save the core of a corporation rather than leave the corpse.

Kodak’s patent battles are not over. While most companies making digital cameras or smartphones have signed royalty agreements accepting that they needed to use patents legitimately, some including their biggest rival Fuji have resisted.

One possibility is that patents – including a portfolio which will bring in substantial earnings for several years to come – will be sold. If a major disputed patent infringer is the buyer, they become the owners of patents which otherwise put a question mark over their balance sheet. As long as a case is in court, any corporation may see its capital value reduced (with its share price) by the amount of the possible liability.

That could make Fuji, Apple or Samsung potential buyers for Kodak. Who has the money to buy Kodak? American, and therefore likely to get permission and support? Apple…

Kodak’s brand has big value worldwide. Control of corporate identity may be limited to providing tins of yellow and red paint, but it works! Karnak, Egypt ©DK

Unfortunately, it does not work the other way round. Pursuing an action for billions does not necessarily convince the market that this is a hidden asset. So while Kodak has aggressively launched several new patent infringement claims in the last few weeks, they had at best a temporary effect on the company’s value, more than matched by reversals.

However, at a time when all stocks have been artificially depressed and the entire market worth a quarter of what was once its stable value, it becomes very difficult to judge the long-term situation. Kodak has a massive theoretical value as a brand, and nearly 5,000 patents still extant from the digital era (the last quarter-century) though all patents do eventually expire. What does not expire is the backdated royalty claim which can be made against a company proven to have infringed patents over a long period.

Kodak stand, photokina 2006 – the market they chased then was the market Sony, to a large extent, owns today ©DK

That’s why Kodak buying some time in Chapter 11 (accompanied by a $950m loan to keep the business running) is significant. If the corporation can avoid being wound up or taken over for long enough to win a patent case, it may rise again. In January, suits were launched against Samsung, Apple and Fuji claiming patent infringement.

Smartphones and pads now do what the excellent little Kodak Z-series pocket video cameras offered in 2008 when the Zi-6 was launched. Ahead of its time, with YouTube connectivity branding, it doesn’t use all the patents Kodak is now defending – which cover wifi, automatic email and network address image uploading, and related photo sharing concepts. ©DK

Think back twenty years. Honeywell had filed actions against many companies for infringement of their autofocus patents, most settled and added to Honeywell’s revenue stream. Minolta, pioneers of autofocus and makers of the first AF SLR system, allowed the case to go to court instead of settling. Though the Minolta photographic division was to survive 15 more years, the huge award in Honeywell’s favour destroyed their reserves and ultimately was the root of their decline and eventual absorption by Sony. That’s what is at stake with claims like this, the patent owner having the chance to grab a huge chunk of a rival’s assets, capital or future revenues.

Kodak did manage to do things within the digital world, from their 1994 Chinon-based first consumer camera to the demise of the DCS Pro 14 megapixel full-frame Canon and Nikon bodies a little over twenty years later. On the consumer front, they made one of the best bridge cameras – the only one that really matched the Konica Minolta Dimage A2. But the P880 was slow, late, ugly and arrived just when bridge cameras were departing this life.

Look, other people’s babies ALWAYS look ugly! Someone at Kodak loved this one. ©DK

For partly sentimental reasons, I bought a few Kodak shares in late 2011 when the signs of doom could be seen. Kodak has been worth tens of thousands to me over the last 40 years, helping from my first days as a photographic journalist. It was in Kodak’s London offices we held our editorial meetings in the 1970s, and twenty years later Kodak’s Gold Awards defined the ultimate professional standard. I may win, I may lose on a handful of shares but I have been able to follow their fluctuations daily.

Abandoning the professional

My 40-year ride with Kodak has not been all good. In 1982, I still had a Kodak direct account as a professional photographer and a Kodak rep would call in monthly. From that catalogue we could buy anything from a pack of lens cleaning tissue to a complete 5 x 4″ monorail camera. All kids of studio equipment, darkroom equipment and sundries joined the vital supplies of film, chemicals and paper in the price list. We became customers for such things as Kodatrace graphic arts foil, grey cards and colour targets.

Then Kodak took the first of the great bad decisions; they closed all direct professional photographer accounts. The reasons given in private, by their executives, were that professional photographers were a huge risk – bad and late payers, takers of excessive credit, unreliable and prone to going bankrupt (hmmm…).

I will agree that the 1980s encouraged businesses to hang on each rung of the turnover ladder by their fingertips, with credit costing a fortune in interest rates, and a tax régime which punished the smaller operation. My own business, however well it did, was always struggling to pay tax bills and when you look at the advance cashflow we had to cover, it is no wonder. Our clients in turn struggled to pay us, but we were charging them a sum for one day’s photography which would pay one month’s average wages.

Back then our business was like a salmon fighting upstream through the rapids to the spawning-grounds. Now it’s like a frog sitting on a lilypad and occasionally flicking out a tongue to catch passing flies. Wonder if the same process, quietly, happened to the Big Yellow Box?

The latitude, colour and tonal quality of Fujichrome 50 exploited in the mid-1980s with a reportage shot of a great antique shop in Martin, Lincolnshire, using Hasselblad SWC. ©DK

Kodak passed their business to trade counters and labs, and took the reps off the road. The trade counters and labs promptly offered rival products alongside Kodak. Within months, we had switched entirely to using Fuji reversal film as their E6 Fujichrome – introduced by our new suppliers – had far superior colours to Ektachrome. The difference was great that in 1983 we were able to open a commercial studio in Nottingham city centre, and grab tens of thousands in business from one long-established rival just because our Fujichrome test shots outshone their Kodak output on the lightbox.

Konica offered us a direct account, and did the same for the local minilab which did much of our machine processing and printing. We bought in Konica for our hand printing, and started using Konica colour negative stock. Then we sealed a deal with the local National Trust region to supply the first film counter dispensers for their shops, and the film supplied was Konica. Ilford Limited, Kodak’s old honourable rival, sourced exactly the same Konica stock and rebranded it as new Ilfocolor and Ilfochrome 100.

Where Kodak discontinued materials, Konica wanted to have more. For many years, Icon’s magazines participated in the annual special order to get infrared film made – something we persuaded Konica to do through PHOTOpro (not the US one, or the current UK magazine, they both nicked our 1989 magazine title).

Kodachrome said fare-thee-well in June, 2009, vanquished by digital media. See that DX coding? Minolta and Kodak worked together on that and Minolta had some of the first cameras with automatically set ISO when you loaded the film. Contrary to many statements, Kodachrome was not especially permanent, undeveloped image life was minimal, processing was highly variable and it didn’t scan well… but photographers still loved it. See baby above. ©DK

From the 1980s on, almost every major Kodak decision was a contraction or a withdrawal when seen from the perspective of a UK photographic business. Kodak film manufacture in Britain ended in 2005 when the last equipment from the Annesley film plant was sold off, but long before this so many excellent members of the professional division staff, so many activities and ambitions had been curtailed. The loss of the Kodak Gold Awards was a body-blow. The end of the Kodak Wedding and Portrait Awards, a knockout punch. Ultimately, Kodak gave up autonomous distribution even to the trade; it all goes through a distributor (Photologic) before it reaches a trade counter or lab.

A Kodak Express outlet in Leith Ocean Terminal, just on the day of opening in 2008, with shelves awaiting stock. It’s still going strong. This is the closest I get to seeing Kodak as a business now – and it is, basically, just a very good franchise operation. ©DK

Where once, every respectable pro photographic studio or small photo shop was a direct Kodak customer and talked to Kodak daily, photographers are now two or three steps removed. There is no longer a connection and it’s unlikely there will be again.

Photographers still do buy Kodak materials – photographic and inkjet papers alike – and the public buys Kodak printers for their honest approach to ink costs. Plenty of clever and excellent digital cameras are bought every day, and Kodak Express shops occupy small but good positions in busy shopping malls. User-operated printing systems turn digital snaps into Kodak prints.

Using Kodak media-card digital printing touch screen systems at photokina 2008. These dye-sublimation printers are actually very affordable for store counters, but there’s no film processing, no film sales, no chemical sales and no silver imaging paper involved. ©DK

It is not yet the time to say R.I.P., Kodak but it’s long past the time that the profession said au revoir, Kodak. It does not have to be adieu, yet. Hasta la vista!

DK's ramblings, News

Sony’s Zeiss 24mm f/2 Distagon ZA SSM T* reviewed

Posted on December 28, 2011 By David Kilpatrick

The Sony Zeiss 24mm f/2 SSM Distagon ZA T* is probably the best, or equal to the best, in its class. It may perhaps be the best ever 84° angle fast lens ever made for the general SLR system market, and I would happy to pitch it against any of the current equivalent offerings for medium format digital.

The initial journey with the 24mm f/2 was not one of intensive companionship – I am long past the stage of getting hold of a wonderful lens and then shoehorning all my photographs into that lens’s view just because I love the glass. I’ve been through that phase. I remember when I was 18 and my then fiancée (Shirley – still here!) bought me a brand new 35mm f/3.5 SMC Takumar, my first ever multicoated lens as well as my first new boxed product. I shot almost everything with that lens for a month…

A full-frame Alpha 900 study at full f/2 aperture. Check the sharpness in the central – very limited – sharp focus zone by clicking the image for a full size version.

My review of the 24mm appears in the British Journal of Photography for January 2012 but was written in November, and at the end I comment that I do not think I would buy one. Well, between writing that and publication – after returning the test lens loaned to me by Paul Genge of Sony UK – I placed my order. I sold a set of lenses including a 28mm f/2 Minolta RS and a 17-35mm Konica Minolta D to pay for it.

Check current availability and price at B&H Photo Video (opens in a new window will not lose this page).

Why?

It was partly medium format which persuaded me. I’ve been experimenting with MF digital, first using a Hasselblad with a Phase One P20 and then shifting to a Mamiya 645 AFII with a 22 megapixel ZD 37 x 49mm back. Once you put the Zeiss on the Alpha 900, the image quality jumps to match the level of a similar MF pixel count. And without spending into the tens of thousands you can’t match the angle of view at a higher pixel count.

These two cameras both shoot 22 megapixels over a 16 x 12″ print shape (the Alpha 900 being cropped) and both were current in 2008 – though the Mamiya ZD model was shortly to disappear. And the two lenses have similar coverage.

I looked at the corners of my MF shots on a 35mm lens (nearly identical angle of view) – to be clean, they demanded f/11. And then I looked at the corners on the Zeiss, which are even cleaner by f/4. Finally, I considered what Sony may have in store – 36 megapixels on full frame. Everything I’ve seen from the 24mm – including its performance on the A77 and A55 – indicates it will not run out of resolution even if full frame goes well over 50 megapixels.

Then I had the job of looking back over the Alpha 900, Alpha 55 and Alpha 77 pictures taken with the 24mm, and preparing some comparison shots. This was when I realised that my normal line-up of zooms, no matter how good, never got the same from any camera – APS-C or full frame – as this CZ prime. It may be bulky, take large filters, and cost nearly £1,000 but no other solution on any format from NEX through A77 to MF offered the same as the 24mm on Alpha 900. You will, however, be surprised later on to see just how well the tiny NEX 16mm f/2.8 does in comparison when both lenses are stopped down to f/8.

The 35mm 2:3 format shape offers a bit of vertical composition ‘rise or fall’ potential compared to to 3:4 shape of my Mamiya with 35mm wide–angle. Beyond this, the 24mm offers both CD and PD focus with different adaptors on the NEX system, and smooth near-silent AF during video on the Alpha 65/77 and future models. It’s both future-proof and a future classic.

Photojournalism or architecture

Because the 24mm has a fast f/2 maximum aperture, it’s seen as a choice for news, documentary, reportage, sports, and close quarters party or family shooting. Though a little vulnerable because of its size, it does this job well. Unlike tele lenses, any mark on the front glass of a wide-angle like this will show in pictures when the aperture is stopped down. Special care should always be taken of retrofocus and fisheye lenses with vulnerable front elements, my own lens will get a Sigma EX DG 72mm UV filter. Why Sigma? I ran a series of ad hoc tests on filters and these turned out to be just as good as Hoya Pro 1 Digital at half the price, and with better multicoating.

At f/2, struggling with light for a hand-held shot with 1/40th at ISO 1600 on the Alpha 55, the 24mm showed surprisingly clean imaging from the boat to the lights on the cliff top.

Here’s a shot taken at f/2.5, 2/3rds of a stop down from wide open – a sensible aperture to give that hint of extra depth of field and improved optical performance. Click the image to view a full size A55 image on pBase.

When fitted to my A55 or A77, the 35mm-equivalent field of view is also a good general lens for photojournalism (what you get is more or less a Fuji X100 equivalent, but hardly pocketable). The performance over the APS-C field of view is so good that working at full aperture carries little penalty at all except restricted depth of field. The geometry and field flatness over the restricted field mean you could use the lens for artwork copying and get a better result than the 50mm f/1.4 of 30mm f/2.8 SAM macro will produce.

Over full frame, this technical excellence makes the lens attractive to the commercial, industrial and architectural photographer. Whenever you need to apply a strong software correction, focal length figures are thrown out of the window. For example, once the on-board lens correction in the A77 is applied to the 16-50mm f/2.8 SSM lens at 16mm the true minimum focal length equivalent becomes close to 17mm not 16mm.

Hasselblad’s 28mm superwide for its HD series cameras has strong barrel distortion, relying on in-camera and Phocus raw software converter functions to remove it. So while the lens claims to be a 17mm equivalent, that is only true over absolute full-frame 645. On their digital sensors, it’s only equal to a 21mm and the correction means the true crop is more like a 23mm.

A second effect of applying any in-camera or post-process distortion correction is loss of true image pixels. Either you crop the frame after sampling down, or the image is interpolated upwards to fill the frame. Both solutions are far from satisfactory because unlike a fixed interpolation, the value ranges from 0 to whatever maximum is involved (typically between 3% and 7%) and all of this is never a clean ratio.

Above: a sea horizon (the top of the crop is the top of the frame, and it is full width). Top, CZ 16-80mm at 16mm 0n Alpha 77, uncorrected, showing complex wave-form distortion as well as vignetting despite stopping down to f/11. Centre: CZ 24mm on Alpha 900, uncorrected, at f/13. Bottom: 24mm after applying a 2% barrel distortion correction. Click image to view a larger version.

Here the 24mm CZ shines. It really uses all the 24 megapixels of the A900 or indeed the A77, because geometric correction rarely needs to be applied. It has a true 24mm focal length which does not need to be quietly changed to 25mm or 26mm by applying a lens profile. If a 35mm retrofocus AF lens was made for MF digital to this standard, even without the f/2 aperture, it would be hailed as a world-beater. The most that’s needed is a correction of 2% (+, removing barrel distortion) in Adobe Camera Raw and this restores something like a sea horizon near the top of a landscape format frame to a perfect straight line.

No correction is applied here to this full frame 24mm Alpha 900 image – a central horizon, and straight lines which are not parallel to the frame edge, make the 2% distortion (similar to many standard 50mm lenses) no issue at all.

For many subjects, depending on the distance and a ‘rigour’ of the shot (the sea horizon is the most demanding example) no correction at all will be needed. This applies to most interiors, and always to scenes like mountain views or forest landscapes where there is no perfectly flat horizon.

The Alpha 900 is so close to MF digital quality I should really forget the attractions of MF systems. Nearly everything I see from them which impresses me is down to using prime lenses of first quality like the Zeiss and Mamiya 80mm f/2.8 standards and working in a methodical way often using a tripod, minimum ISO, mirror-up operation. Applying the same parameters to Alpha full frame lifts the end result to match – and the CZ 24mm f/2 is a key to unlock that quality.

At f/14, the 24mm is not losing detail sharpness on the Alpha 900 as long as the correct raw processing parameters are applied. To secure this depth of field, f/14 was needed – a medium format camera would require f/27. Holding the camera, viewing and composing this shot were all aided by the ergonomics, weight and viewfinder quality of the Alpha 900. Click image for a full size version on pBase.

This is a dual-purpose or multi-purpose lens. Where the 16mm focal length of the NEX SEL 16mm f/2.8, the Alpha SAL 16-50mm f/2.8, the CZ 16-80mm or SAL 16-105mm all cover the same nominal angle not one of these has the same neutral geometry, even illumination and good corner to corner sharpness at wider apertures. Corrected by software, they don’t have the same true angle and the outer field can become noisy because of extra sensor-mapping gain applied to reduce vignetting.

The size and SEL comparison!

But I would like to show you something surprising. I am a great fan of the 16mm NEX f/2.8 pancake, which is one of the few such lenses made to have a positive (pincushion) simple distortion pattern and a cup not cap shaped field of focus. It is a revolutionary inverted telephoto design of great simplicity, with only 5 elements, enabling the lens to be 16mm focal length yet have a rear node position over 20mm from the sensor – thus avoiding all kinds of vignetting and colour shift problems.

People who don’t understand how to use a focus plane where the corners are focused FURTHER than the centre – the exact opposite of the CZ 24mm f/2 where the corners are focused CLOSER than the centre – do tests like landscapes wide open and wonder why the grass either side of their feet dissolves into blur. Actually all the little 16mm needs is modest stopping down, as would be applied by any professional using a Super Angulon for that matter, to f/8.

First of all, have a look at some lens sizes. I like this shot, as it shows just how big CZ had to make the 24mm to get what they did. It dwarfs the SEL 16mm for NEX and the classic Minolta 28mm f/2 RS:

I’d like you to see the exact comparison between Alpha 900 with 24mm CZ and NEX-5 with SEL 16mm.

This is the A900 and 24mm, entirely uncorrected and uncropped – the building on the right actually does not have a straight wall, don’t be fooled into thinking there’s a sudden burst of barrel distortion! Aperture f/8.

This the NEX with 16mm, corrected in ACR; I’ve tried to keep the camera positions very close but this was real-time shooting and with viewfinder versus screen composition, not so easy. You can see that the 16mm has slightly less true angle of view when corrected but don’t judge from the foreground flower tub, just check the horizontal angle. This is also at f/8.

You can click each image and view a full size JPEG. I have made both of them 24 megapixels, exporting from the NEX to the same size file as the Alpha 900. That may be unfair but you can judge. My opinion is that both the NEX 14 megapixel sensor and the SEL 16mm are underestimated by far too many owners; as far as ISO noise handling goes, the 16mm f/2.8 on NEX is actually as ‘fast’ as the 24mm f/2 on Alpha 900 but that comparison may change with future full frame bodies. As for depth of field, the f/8 shot on APS-C would need to be at f/13 on full frame to match, but in practice both are well covered.

Using the NEX 16mm in different conditions would produce a different result – wide open in a room interior, the corners would be likely to look very blurred. My scene above conforms to the cup-shape focus plane of the NEX lens, and works against the cap-shape focus plane of the CZ 24mm.

Remember as a general rule: barrel distortion = corners focused close than centre. Pincushion distortion = corners focused further away than centre. Moustache or wave form = a doughnut normally of closer focus between centre and corners, but when a full frame lens with this type of distortion (like the 16-35mm CZf/2.8 – or a more extreme example, Canon’s 24-105mm f/4 L) is used on APS-C, you get this doughnut at the corners and more or less have straight barrel distortion not waveform. No distortion at a given distance usually means a flat focus field, the quality which Carl Zeiss highlighted when naming the Planar lens.

Alternatives to the 24mm

The best way to get the 84° coverage with similar near-perfect rendering is to go for the mid-range of a high end zoom. As it happens, Sigma’s 8-16mm is better at 16mm than any of the above-mentioned APS-C options and you can also get a pretty good 16mm from their 10-20mm options and Tamron’s 10-24mm. Tokina’s 11-16mm f/2.8 is weakest at 16mm, best at 11mm. The older Sony 11-18mm is not wonderful at the longer end.

On full format, 24mm at the bottom end of the 24-70mm CZ is no match, it has more distortion and softer corners; 24mm in the middle of the 16-35mm CZ f/2.8’s range is better but with strong complex distortion, more even than the Konica Minolta 17-35mm f/2.8-4 D lens (which manages f/3.2 wide open at 24mm). You might think Sigma’s 12-24mm full frame zoom could be good at 24mm, and perhaps version II HSM when it finally become available for Alpha will prove to be. The original, which I still use mainly for its superb 12mm results, places its worst extreme of field flatness deviation at the image edge when set to 24mm.

I have used Canon’s 24mm f/1.4 USMII and this is faster, larger and more expensive than the Sony CZ lens in almost perfect proportion. Like the CZ f/2 it is a nearly perfect lens, with a hint more barrel distortion and slightly soft extreme corners on full frame wide open. The same goes for the Nikon 24mm f/1.4. I’ve also used Canon’s 24mm TSE tilt-shift and this lens betters the CZ for technical and architectural uses, as it should – so does their 17mm f/4 TSE, which has no match in any format. But such lenses can’t also be used for everyday autofocus image grabbing whether professional or family.

Last question, then. If such a perfect lens can be made at f/2, surely all the affordable 24mm f/2.8 designs could be just as good? We wish! Wouldn’t it be great if the classic Minolta 24mm f/2.8 AF which Sony never transferred to the new Alpha range proved to have the same optical excellence as the CZ? It does not. Nor do the Canon 24mm f/2.8, or the Nikon, or anything made by Pentax or Olympus, or even Leica.

The 24mm f/2 used at f/2.8 on the Alpha 55. Try this with a classic Minolta 24mm f/2.8 and even on APS-C you won’t get the same corner to corner even illumination. Here the focus is on the distance, not the tourists – they are also showing a surprising amount of movement at 1/40th. Click the image for a full size view.

This 24mm is the most recent AF 24mm prime lens to have been designed for full format. Zeiss have designed a slightly more complex manual focus 25mm f/2 Distagon for Cosina partnered manufacture, available for Canon and Nikon, since Sony showed the 24mm at photokina 2010. But Sony’s full-frame DSLR rivals, Canon and Nikon, have not gone for this sub-£1,000 RRP ‘moderately fast’ 24mm niche.

If there’s one competitor, it is Sigma’s excellent 24mm f/1.8 EX DG, which uses a larger 77mm front diameter glass unit to reduce vignetting to the absolute minimum. Distortion is higher, and the lens at present has no HSM version. This makes it less future-proof for Alpha system owners, and also less compatible with NEX and with video shooting in general.

Features of the 24mm

Because it’s a fixed focal length, the 24mm is a very plain lens – it has only two controls and one moving ring. There is an AF/MF switch, though unlike SAM lenses this lens can always be controlled from the body. With SAM type lenses (built in non-supersonic focus motor) it is essential to use only the lens switch, and never to use the body switch instead while leaving the lens set to AF. This is because any attempt to focus manually may damage the gears and motor unless the switch on the lens is specifically disengaged.

Manual focus or held focus can be set or toggled using the single on-lens button. New Alpha models like the 77 allow a wider range of functions to be assigned to the lens button, which is described in the menus as a Focus Hold button. Direct Manual Focus is also supported on bodies which offer DMF, meaning that once focus is confirmed and locked by your pressure on the shutter button, you can fine-tune focus by eye before firing.

The manual focus action is very smooth and well balanced, not too light and not too short in throw (which can be an issue with shorter focal lengths. The focus scale is minimal, behind a traditional Minolta-style clear window, with a depth of field indicator to the minimum f/22 aperture. Really, such markings mean little today as we expect so much from higher resolution sensors. It is time that Sony, and others, built parameter-governed DoF calculation into firmware.

Here, f/5.6 was judged to be fine for the degree of differential focus wanted – at ISO 400, by tungsten kitchen spotlights and window light mixed, on the Alpha 77 hand-held with SteadyShot and manual ‘peaking’ focus.

The CZ design is clearly corrected for medium distance work but retains its performance for close-ups. Unlike Sigma’s design which achieves 1:2.7 image scale, or the new manual Zeiss 25mm which focuses down to 18cm and 1:4, the Alpha lens focuses to 19cm (actually, I make it 18cm as the scale goes beyond the 19cm marking) and manages a 1:3.4 image. Don’t be fooled by distances! The front element of the CZ is already 12.2cm from the sensor plane, and the lens hood takes another 3cm or so. The actual clearance when shooting at close range is minimal. For comparison, the SEL 16mm f/2.8 for NEX will only focus down to 24cm, and the front of this lens is only 40mm from the sensor, leaving a clear 20cm between camera and subject. The Nikon and Canon f/1.4 designs are limited to 25cm and are, quite simply, nothing like as useful for close-ups as the CZ.

You might think that the 16-50mm f/2.8 or the 16-80mm CZ could match the combination of wide angle and close focus found on the 24mm – but not so. To get similar close-ups even at a 24mm setting is not possible – an extra 6 or 7cm in minimum focus distance, when you are talking an 83-84° angle of view, makes a big difference.

Moving in to minimum focus, the bottom wing of the lens hood was only 1cm away from the subject – under 19cm from bread roll to sensor, but only 6.8cm from bread roll to front element. At f/3.2, a hand-held 1/40th was needed (the closer you get, the less you can rely on SS to handle speeds like 1/15th). Focus peaking again enabled the manual focus point to be precisely judged. Great bokeh too.

With a non-rotating front thread, 72mm is one of the classic Minolta sizes. It is necessary to use slimline filters, as with the 20mm f/2.8. It’s interesting to compare the revived older lens with the newer one. The 20mm has only five mount contacts, being non-D specification where the 24mm has eight and reports much more accurate focus data. The 20mm has no lens button, uses screw drive focus, and has a close limit of 25cm at which it has a 1:7.7 image scale. There is also a considerable difference in the build and feel of the CZ; I have no doubt it contains some plastic, but it feels like a good solid piece of engineering and is stated by Sony to have a metal lens barrel. Not metal-skinned plastic, like NEX lenses.

As for coatings, Minolta’s legacy was a use of multiple layer (super achromatic) coatings to rebalance both the contrast and the colour transmission of the entire AF lens range (except designs made by third parties, like the 100-400mm APO). This advantage over other makes was never capitalised on, and made some Minolta designs seem lower in contrast than competitor’s equivalents. No-one ever complained about the colour though! Zeiss’s path from 1975 onwards was to use multicoatings a different way, maximising contrast and light transmission but permitting each lens design to have its own colour transmission quality and variation in contrast. Contax RTS lenses were always praised for their resistance to flare and their extreme macrocontrast.

Since the advent of digital, both overall contrast and colour transmission have become less critical – no need for packs of filters to balance lenses for repro purposes, no need to test Kodachrome with a clip-test to set this up. Just post process or shoot a WB card to taste. Also, Sony Alpha lenses are made in many places – the old Minolta unit, the new CZ-Sony collaboration, co-developed with Tamron and apparently also with Sigma, built by Shanghai Optical or some other owned and partnership facilities in China, made in Thailand but not apparently any more in Malaysia…

While distortion associated with viewpoint and perspective perception is always a companion to shorter focal lengths, over the field of the Alpha 77 (equal to a 35mm lens view or so, in full-frame terms) shapes and solids look natural. At f/4, and ISO 1250, I’ve chosen to downsize this 77 file to 3600 x 2400 pixels (click the image to open). This still allows you to see how clean the light sources in-shot are, with absence of colour fringes. Depending on conditions 1 pixel CA cancelling may be needed with the 24mm.

So, we have here a lens with a Zeiss design and a T* coating which is entirely unlike any Minolta legacy design and will surprise those used to the way ex-Minolta lenses perform. It is fairly immune to flare, not entirely so when confronted with bright sources just outside the image margin, but without the strings of coloured patches associated with 24mms and light sources in the shot. It focuses silently and at a speed which means you may not notice it.

The lens itself weighs 555g, and at 76mm length and 78mm diameter it’s smaller than the 16-50mm f/2.8 SSM which weighs 22g more. I’m not a big fan of lenses you can not clasp in one hand while also operating the lens release mount of a camera; optics this size and weight are about the safe limit. You can not compared the lens-juggling friendliness of the 28mm f/2, for example, with either the 24mm or 16-50mm and even the 16-80mm zoom is much easier to handle in the field. It’s best to remove or fit the hood before changing the lens, don’t leave it in storage position.

The hood reverses over the lens neatly. The whole item, when in this configuration, is a bit large to handle for safe and secure lens changing.

The finish is lustrous, with rubber rib grips that collect dust and dander readily. The supplied lens hood is surprisingly flexible plastic, with a slight spatter finish to the exterior and a kind of semi-flock paint on the inside. It is efficient, but a poor fit with a not very firm bayonet locking action. It’s easy to get the alignment wrong and it’s not as firm or solid as most other Sony hoods. The rear lens cap is still the frustrating one-orientation only design inherited from Minolta, which leaves even those with a quarter of a century of lenscap-fitting experience fumbling for the correct position.

There is of course a Zeiss front lens cap and you get a free blue badge on the lens itself!

Format, pixel count and cropping

For many years when using film I found wide-angle zooms were not essential, standard zooms were useful, and tele zooms were vital. Generally, with any wide-angle you can zoom with your feet or by doing little more than leaning forward or back a bit. Either that or you simply need the widest lens you can get. Whenever I fit my Sigma 8-16mm or 12-24mm on their respective formats it’s the 8mm or 12mm end which is needed. I only end up zooming in if for some reason I decide to leave the lens on, and move to a different situation without time to switch lenses.

With film, you could crop and enlarge. Small pixel count DSLRs made that difficult or impossible – when you are trying to make 6 megapixels do a full page magazine image, cropping is not an option. Zooming in to fill the frame every time became vital from 2000 to 2008 when the first full frame 24 megapixel models arrived.

I think that 24 megapixels has finally made cropping an alternative to zooming. You may need 9 or maybe 12 megapixels, or if you are shooting entirely for the web you may need no more than 2 megapixels. Fixed focal lengths of exceptional quality, sharp all over the frame in the plane of focus, start to be useful. It has never been a good option to crop wide-angle zoom shots asymmetrically, using just one corner. With a lens like the 24mm you can crop any composition out of the high resolution frame and it will not look so different from an on-axis shot with a narrow angle lens.

Lens resolution really does count, as I have found. For three years I used the Alpha 900 with a range of lenses, including the 24-85mm Minolta RS I keep for convenience. When working with medium format lenses on adaptors, I could see that zooms while ‘sharp enough’ usually came nowhere near realising the potential of the 900. Then, using the 24mm, I saw the same pixel-level sharpness pop out. After a month using the 24mm (kindly loaned by Paul Genge) my ordered Alpha 77 finally arrived. I had already seen how the 24mm got the maximum from 16 megapixel APS-C, and this was followed by discovering its power to do the same at 24 megapixel APS-C.

A standard Sony leather-look lens posing pouch is supplied.

How far can this go? If Sony’s 24 megapixel APS-C sensor formed the basis for a full-framer, it would be a 60 megapixel monster and match all but the most expensive medium format image sizes. I believe the 24mm CZ could go there if Sony chose to.

And that, in the end, is why I changed my mind about owning one. The hour or two of useful daylight and howling gales outside have not allowed me to make much use of it yet – but this is a lens for the long term. And for tomorrow’s Alphas as well as today’s.

– David Kilpatrick

Footnote: added February 2016 – I’m now selling this lens, as I don’t think Sony is likely to produce an A99 model II with functions that will restore what I want to have (notably, GPS – they are most likely to drop this). I’m looking at a move to native FE-mount lenses and probably the 25mm f/2 CZ Batis, even though it’s weaker for close-ups, vignetting and distortion.

Here is a recent example of a full aperture shot on the A7RII with LA-EA3 adaptor –

http://www.pbase.com/davidkilpatrick/image/162677066

DK's ramblings, Equipment Reviews, Lenses - Alpha Mount

Does Canon EOS-1D X point the way?

Posted on October 18, 2011 By David Kilpatrick

Rhetorical question. Actually, if you read the information carefully, it’s pretty clear that the 1D X is more or less a 1D MkIV (16 megapixels,1.3X frame factor) with the sensor area increased to full frame. The pixels are actually larger than the MkIV so for any given telephoto lens, the true resolution of a sports/news/wildlife subject will be lower.

The 1D MkIV has a 27.9mm x 18.6mm sensor capturing 4896 x 3264 pixels or 175 pixels per millimetre.The 1D X has a 24 x 36mm sensor capturing 5184 x 3456 pixels or just 144 pixels per millimetre. The photon-capturing area, all other things being equal which they probably are not, is approximately 50% greater for every 1D X sensel compared to every 1D MkIV sensel.

That, if you like, can account for half of the one-stop maximum senstivity gain in the new camera; improved microlenses and filters, manufacturing and design will account for the rest. Canon, however, claims that the new Twin Digic 5+ processors are actually responsible for the noise reduction (as well as moiré reduction in video – a related function).

This is from the press info:

“Offering performance up to three times faster than standard DIGIC 5, each processor is designed to manage huge levels of image data while simultaneously reducing image noise”.

So there is no specific claim that the CMOS itself is lower noise, mostly that the Digic 5+ dual processing does this. That is something fairly new in a world which complains about raw file noise reduction. Does it matter whether the final image quality is a result of processing, or the result of a clean readout from a good signal to noise ratio CMOS?

The claim is that the X is two stops better for noise. Having used the 1D MkIV, I can confirm that this is already pretty amazing even at ISO 25,600 and perfectly usable at 6400. If Canon’s claim is correct, the X will be as good at 25,600 and then has a usable 51,200. Beyond this, 102k and 204k EI – the highest ISO equivalent ever in a DSLR – could be usable for extreme conditions in news, military, surveillance. It’s hard to think why else you would be shooting in the dark.

The processors also allow continuous (no limit) 14-bit raw shooting using twin UDMA CF card slots, at 12fps. There’s a huge gulf between the 11 to 18 shot bursts which the Alpha 77 can handle, and never slowing down at all. By swtiching to JPEG, the capture speed can be increased to 14fps and again it never slows down.

The camera itself is very much a 1D but with improvements to the ergonomics and interface which are long overdue. Canon has stuck with a 1990s design because familiarity from generation to generation has been a key point when persuading professionals to buy the new models. Most pros don’t want to see a single button moved a single millimetre, or any change in the way the camera responds. News agencies have actually hired tech support companies to sit down with batches of new cameras and spend an hour making sure all the deeply-hidden custom settings match those on the outgoing gear.

Here’s what Canon says about the X: “The menu system also features a comprehensively redesigned user interface, incorporating Help functions to make camera operation faster, clearer and easier. Additionally, a new dedicated AF tab allows photographers to access and customise AF pre-sets for common shooting situations or subjects, allowing users to concentrate on capturing the moment without the need to constantly adjust camera settings.”

About time too! I have almost been lynched by Canon and Nikon owners alike for taking a new camera out of the box, setting it to P, and shooting everyday scenes only to find half my intended subjects out of focus. But then, I’m testing the camera, not my own ability to configure it. This has been a major problem for all advanced AF models with complex sensors (the X has a 61-point wide AF sensor with 41 cross-type, 5 double-cross and an integrated 100,000 pixel RGB metering sensor which links to AF also provides face and horizon/vertical line detection). Sony does seem to have avoided issues by keeping the A77 AF fairly simple. Anyone who has used a Canon 7D with the wrong focus behaviour set, and seen their chosen subject suddenly zap out of focus just before pressing the shutter, will know that responsiveness and auto selection of focus points can lose pictures.

So I for one am happy to see that Canon has addressed an issue often denied and brought some key AF behaviour control up front instead of buried in obscure custom settings.

Are Canon owners really gearheads? Maybe not. Canon also announced they just passed the 50 million EOS cameras mark, and the 70 million EOS lenses, the same time as the 1D X launch. That’s just 1.4 lenses for each Canon EOS body. Sigma must be doing well. But, as upgrading Alpha owners know well enough, body-only sales are very common these days. And Canon lenses just keep going the same way those old Minolta lenses do. There will be plenty of 1980s glass still in use on this 2011 camera.

Back to the rhetorical question – yes and no. Sony has never had a 1.3X sensor size, so could not do something like apparently increasing the pixel count while actually lowering the resolution (and thus the telephoto true reach). All Sony could do would be to backtrack from 24 megapixels towards 16, on either full frame or APS-C – or keep full frame at 24, and transform the performance and speed of the 9xx series.

For those who feel a bit peeved than Canon’s $7000 camera has just stolen the high-speed crown from Sony’s $1300 Alpha by offering 12fps and a boosted 14fps, just remember that with 255 pixels per millimetre the Alpha 77 captures subjects at a 77% higher magnification (100% pixel view) than the new 1D X and that means your humble A77 user with a 70-400mm SSM G is punching at the same weight as a 1D X user with a 125-700mm zoom.

And that 14fps is achieved with the mirror locked up and the focus and exposure locked on the first frame – strictly a tripod job or one for a steady hand, with no ability to see the subject once the shutter is pressed. And, even though the Canon offers sixteen times the senstivity for low light shootings, the Alpha can actually meter the light in conditions four times darker than the Canon at EV-2 rather than EV0.

These cameras are not competing, obviously, so my comments are not to be taken seriously. It’s just interesting to see how high end consumer SLT technology and specifications compare to fifth-generation heavy duty professional SLR.

– David Kilpatrick

Cameras (DSLR), DK's ramblings, News

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