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Hates the Infotainment
 
Join Date: May 2004
Location: NSA Archives
 
2006-11-10, 10:21

Quote:
Originally Posted by Eugene View Post
The fact that you still question all of this is somewhat annoying. And what noise trade-off are we talking about here?
Sorry to annoy you, but maybe you're taking it kind of personally. You don't work for Foveon do you? Maybe
"trade off" was the wrong choice of phrase. Prior generations of Sigma cameras produce fairly noisy results on shots with relatively long exposures (1/8, 1/4, 1/2, 1", etc), or low light exposures. Hence, when enlarging them out of camera, the results aren't likely to = 8MP (or 10MP or whatever) when you have the same shot from another high-end, higherMP camera. Another point is that when you push the ISO on the older Sigmas, the noise doesn't increase as dramatically as other cameras, but the color accuracy that is the hallmark of the camera, drops off noticeably.

We'll see with the SD-14. Maybe they've made great strides in the ISO/noise department, but fundamentally it's the same technology that's creating the image so I'm a skeptical bastard until I see evidence from out in the real world. And, FWIW, I'm equally skeptical with Nikon when they introduce cameras like the D2x and D200, touting great noise performance. So far only the D200 and a couple of Canon DSLRs have really beaten the noise game IMO. The S3 Pro is pretty good also. Just about everything else suffers badly once you get to about ISO 400, unless it's a very well lit scene.


Quote:
It's not scalable because Foveon doesn't have a purse like Sony, Canon or even Fujifilm. Also you're talking about mass-market sensors with 24 and 36 million pixels. Economies of scale at work here in addition to the technology just being far more complex.
I recognize they don't have the money those other companies do, but they have enough that if it were technically practical to scale it up to say 6.5 MP per layer, they would've done that. It's obviously a technical barrier where to go to the next level (and by that I mean just a few extra MP per layer, not some huge amount), the cost would be gi-normous. Now that we know that fine, but two months ago nobody knew what the next generation was going to bring and many expected more.

Again I'm not saying Foveon is a bad technology I'm just saying as a photographer, it would've been exciting if they could've figured out a way, given their 4 year hiatus, to bring a new Foveon chip to the *pro* (not mass) market that other manufacturer's could license for use in their cameras. I think at low MP counts, Foveon is probably the best technology, but the simple fact is none of its competition are using low MP counts, and in some cases they're playing from a point of near-parity in terms of color fidelity and noiseless images at low ISO.

That's all the more I'll say of it. To the others, sorry for my part in the hijacking.


And now for something completely different.... a BW picture.

http://forums.applenova.com/attachme...1&d=1163172006
Attached Images
File Type: jpg fishoutwater.jpg (36.1 KB, 12 views)

...into the light of a dark black night.
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