Sony A77: great but not the best when light is low

On camerageek website DPReview they always do very serious tests, and the Web community reacts very seriously. Verdict on studio pictures made with the Sony A77: the experts do not all agree (otherwise they would not be experts), but there seems to be a majority opinion that the Sony A77 has great performance for a camera of its size and price. In fact, it can hold out with the best cameras at any price, give or take a pixel here or there. Except when it gets dark: then the loss of light through the new semi-translucent mirror results in more noise, less sharpness.

Sadly, the (excellent!) comparison tool on the DPReview site does not include samples made with my current camera, because that is of course the real question: I am not considering buying a whole new system from any camera brand, I am just considering if it is worthwhile to upgrade from my current Sony A700. And then even without direct comparisons there is little doubt: this is going to be a huge improvement! When can I get it....?

More on Sony A77 (in Dutch): Eerste indrukken Sony Alpha 77, Alpha 65 en Nex 7 - Photofacts

Eerste indrukken Sony Alpha 77, Alpha 65 en Nex 7 - Photofacts

Preview of Sony A77

Why did they announce this while I was on vacation? The review in the link below is on a pre-production camera, but a few days later it was announced officially: the Sony A77 SLT.

This Sony A77 promises to be veeerrry attractive to the likes of me who still think of Sony as 'the new Minolta', yet want state-of-the-art technology. The idea of replacing the good old mechanical mirror flipflopping up and down with a fixed, semitransparent construction has great potential, I think. And I'm glad that after the A55 mid-range camera with which this "SLT" technology was introduced, they are now moving up. There was already an A65 and now the A77.

Another strong point is said to be its electronic viewfinder. I was of the conservative opinion that an optical viewfinder has better resolution and less electronic colour distortion/interpretation, but this one promises to be real good, with 2.3 M pixels (there were times when 2M pixels made a decent camera!).

One of the package options, moreover, is the camera body with a "kit lens" of truly interesting specs: 2.8/16-50mm. That is not a kit lens, but could be a really good one! I have grown very fond of my 2.8 telezoom, and am already looking forward to a standard zoom with the same large opening.

Only two questions remain. First, can I afford it? Sub-question: any reader making an offer on my Sony A700 (used but good-looking!)?
And second, should I go for it, or wait for the full-frame A99?

Sony SLT-A77 Preview: 1. Introduction: Digital Photography Review

HDR built-in: New Sony camera A550

Rumours had been around in the internet for more than half a year already, so I am a bit late to discover that the recently released Sony α550 camera has a trick inbuilt to make HDR pictures. HDR = High Dynamic Range and means that you can get pictures that show detail in the dark parts as well as in the light parts. Without HDR you'd get details in the dark parts but a pure white spot of clouds, or the other way around: well-deatiled clouds but completely black shadows. The α550 takes two pictures successively and combines them automatically to an HDR picture! That is almost the ideal I was waiting for, as I admitted some time ago: an HDR-sensor. Anyone interested in my "old" α700? ;-)

Compact to show

I'm a bit behind on the camera release front, and no wonder (I soothe myself), because new cameras are announced almost daily. But this one is worth noticing: early August, Nikon announced a compact camera with built-in projector. It should give you a view of up to 40", instead of the 2 to 3" screens at the back of compact cameras before which we now have to rub our heads with other onlookers to get a faint idea of the new baby, or whatever people take pictures of. I like the idea of being more aware of the fact that photos are there not just to be taken, but to be viewed. Viewing should be made as simple as possible--quite in agreement with Nikon, and also with other camera makers who let you upload seamlessly to web galleries and social network sites. But will this built-in projector work?

There are some drawbacks. Not the 40" maximum size; that's more than most home tv screens. But that is the maximum, probably only reached under ideal circumstances (no disturbing environmental light, a good flat and white background, I guess). Besides, your tv nowadays has up to HD resolution (1920x1080 pixels, about 2 megapixel--still less than modern phone cameras, let alone good compacts or DSLRs), while this camera-projector is said to have VGA resolution; that means 640x480 or 0.3 megapixel. That won't look good at 40" size, not even if you take the larger viewing distance into account. (The relevance of viewing distance: People look at a small-size picture from a small viewing distance, so it needs a higher resolution to seem sharp than a large-size picture, which they need to step back from to take it all in at a single viewing.)

Besides, I wonder about the colour rendering of the small built-in projector. In our camera club, we worked for close to two hours with a normal-size projector to get its colours more or less right by tweaking all kinds of menu settings against a number of test pictures, from colour cards to 'real life' photos including landscapes, portraits, etc. (No, we don't have a calibration apparatus for LCD projectors--but that's another sad story.) And that was with a fairly new projector already in use, which had been installed by a professional seller and which the non-camera club users found quite alright and convincing as for its colour rendering.

I don't want to forget to mention that the battery time for projecting would be no more than one hour. Probably that's even quite a feat, technically--and more than enough for the slide shows you want to submit your family and friends to. Maybe they should have limited slide show duration to twenty minutes, for the sake of the family and friends ;-)

All in all, Nikon had a good idea, but I'm sceptical as to its practical use. I'll wait for the third generation of such cameras-cum-projector. At least the third generation.

On time zones and smart design

When exporting the photos of the hotel atrium for the blog entry of last night, they were in "tomorrow's" date folder on the computer. I had forgotten to change the time in the camera. Now I brought just the simple compact camera, not the DSLR, and I don't know its menus that well. But it was easy to find time settings and I was completely surprised to see that it had the option of setting two time zones: "home" and "destination". Destination is sought by scrolling across a world map; no need to fiddle with hour settings at all. It's a breeze! In the DSLR I'd have to search through more menu pages and then would have to adjust hour settings manually.

But even in the DSLR I still could DO it. In my so-called smartphone, I quickly returned to the European time settings, because when I changed the time zone, the MS-Outlook app decided that all appointments would have to be adjusted as well, completely spoiling the carefully-planned dinner meeting to midday, interviews to the middle of the night... Why would it assume that I made appointments in my home time zone if they were for an intercontinental trip?

Well, to compensate for that bit of frustration about not so smart design, I'll add another picture of the hotel atrium--still with the wrong time zone in its data, if you care to look them up :-)

Magnolia in Spring--Far to Go to Reach Imogen Cunningham

Really irresistible, this spring: temperatures are much above normal since some time and all plants and flowers are just exploding! After a day of hard work in the garden, the magnolia tree looked gorgeous in the sunset. Even better is the purity of a single magnolia flower in close-up. But a snapshot like mine is far from the perfect photo Imogen Cunningham once made of a magnolia--I swhowed her photo a long time ago already.
Still, I'm not dissatisfied with this snapshot, the more so as it was taken with the 'second camera', the Panasonix Lumix TZ5, and without a tripod. Not bad at all, this little compact camera! But that's something I said before, too ;-)

Hotel view and panoramas in Prague

"It must be great to travel so much!", is what people sometimes say to me. To counter the idea that travel for work is as nice as traveling for pleasure, I once started to make a series of depressing photos from my hotel windows in famous cities--often the only thing I'd see, apart from conference rooms, airports, and the (traffic-laden) road in between. That series started in the days of analogous photography (but was not kept well-organised), and sometimes I still add to it. Prague is a great city to add to that series of sadness: although much has been restored since I first saw the city, just after the Fall of the Wall, there still are views of "maintenance wanted" situations and one of those was right opposite my hotel room, across a narrow street in the Old Town.

This time, the trip had its nice, touristy moments: we had some time to enjoy the panoramas of the city. Can you spot the post-processing, apart from the obvious cropping? I guess you can: in both cases I made the sky more 'dramatic' by reducing the exposure locally by about one stop. Of course I tried to make the effect as much as possible look as if I had used a graded neutral density filter.

By the way, these pictures were taken with a normal compact camera (it is not worthwhile carrying the DSLR for those few photo occasions). I am quite satisfied with the results of the Lumix TZ-5: good colour rendition, good resolution. Too bad it's all in Jpeg, though.

Noise reduced: firmware update Sony A700

Good to have a photoclub, for I had not been paying attention to the Sony website lately: a new version of the firmware for the A700 was published already in September! Version 4 is meant to tackle my main issue with the A700: noise in high sensitivity settings. Or more completely (from Sony Europe):

* The choice to select auto exposure bracketing (single & continuous) with 3 shots in 2 EV steps has been added. [That is nice for HDR pictures! I'd like to start that discipline once.]
* The choice to turn [Off] the High ISO NR feature has been added. [Great! I want to be in control.]
* Improvement of the image quality in high ISO setting. [This is the main improvement for me]
* Improvement of the auto white balance and D-Range Optimizer performance. [One of my reasons for always shooting RAW is that the auto-white was not always to be trusted. I'll keep shooting RAW, though. I don't use the D-range optimiser; also a matter of wanting to control things myself.]
* Improvement of reliability for communication between camera body and vertical grip. [Don't have that thing.]

Of course I immediately made a quick try of higher ISO settings. My impression is that ISO 1600 is as good now as ISO 800 was: quite usable. There is a visible reduction in quality from ISO 1600 to 3200. See first set of compared photos. This (out-of-focus) detail from the top-left corner of a picture shows this effect.

The settings of the noise reduction do make a difference. My impression is that setting the noise reduction to 'high' is a big improvement for larger areas, but may make edges and shadows a bit too 'rough'. Look at the left side of the picture frame in the comparison of two photos below.


Thanks to Dieter for telling me about the firmware update!

Test, relevance and reputation

The November 2008 issue of Black & White Photography has a column in which Mike Johnston defends his way of testing cameras and lenses. He argues against trying to be completely objective: it is not the figures that matter, but the trial of the gear in dfficult, actual photography circumstances. I completely agree with Mike: too often testers focus on what is measurable rather than on what is relevant--not just in photography but also in my professional field of higher education. There, rankings are made of things that can be measured but whose relation to educational quality are uncertain. Similarly for photo gear: their 'performance' in laboratory circumstances is only a remote indication of what you can do with the thing in practice. In practice, all kinds of circumstances and especially your own needs are much more important than the 'objective' figures. You use different focal lengths, differnt distances, and handheld instead of on a tripod as they did in the test, or you take different types of pictures. For instance, my new standard zooom lens got fairly good test results, but with my preference for architectural pictures, the slight distortion in the wide-angle setting weighed more heavily than what I could read in the mags. Or take the high-quality lens I looked at: it was indeed great from a technical point of view, but way too heavy to be practical on a day-long hike. So let me quote Mike's conclusion: 'The bottom line is that observation is at least as important a method of inquiry as measurement is. It is no less relevant and no less reputable.'

Hard words on hardware

Let's admit it: sometimes my choices are not as successful as I'd wish. I told you why I compromised on quality of the standard zoom lens. Yesterday I had my first real 'expedition' with the Sony 3.5-5.6/16-105 and I was not happy with the amount of barrel distortion in the 16mm setting. I mean, this was not distortion that was measurable in the lab, but it was really visible in my normal pictures.

And while I am in a confessionary mood: the Sony Alpha 700 has some drawbacks too: I find that 800 ISO and above sensitivy settings simply give too much nois eto be useful.

Dynamic Range

Did I say somewhere that there is no magic in ever larger numbers of pixels? I just bought myself a new camera, a Sony A700, with 12M pixels, double the number of my old & true KonicaMinolta 7D. And the first picture that I printed is amazingly sharp, even at A3-size! (A little example will be added in due course--it's in the next entry.)

But the real puzzle with this new camera is the DRO, the 'dynamic range optimizer'. It's supposed to give more detail in dark areas of pictures, before they are compressed in-camera to JPEGs. A nice test is given by one Gamin, with a range of pictures using different settings. If I understand things well, what it does is changing the tonal curve that you encounter in your Gimp, Photoshop, Lightroom, Aperture or what have you: it makes the shadows and darks lighter. It can't add to the total range of tones, can it? If that is true, it can't be of any importance to the RAW photographer, right? Then why does Sony add a dynamic range thingy in its RAW conversion software for the PC? If there is anyone out there who can explain the logic to me, please do!

Until then I uninstalled the Sony converter, because it has a hopelessly cluttered set of panels to make adjustments to the RAW picture, which then is saved as a TIFF file. I like Lightroom's 'virtual' changes much better (as well as it's clear screen layout, once you've changed the funny panel end marks to simple boxes), storing all my adaptations and post-processing, but always giving access to the original RAW file until I decide to export the file in the format I wish.