Hi Moose,
I am not very sure if E-3 has better dynamic range than E-1. Obviously
has much better technology and it has a Live MOS sensor vs CCD so
noise it´s lower but what about pixel density (6.8 µm vs 4.7 µm),
blooming, etc... Many E-3 users report RAW darkroom is worse than E-1.
E-1 with a larger exposed surface can collect more photons in the
shadow areas than E-3 with smaller pixels during the exposure time
that is needed to prevent the bright pixels from overflowing.
I would like to see a real comparative between these to cameras.
Olympus have made a good job packing more pixels and keeping noise
relatively low but... is dynamic range wider than Kodak KAF-5101CE ?
CCDs technology has disadvantages but dynamic range is wider than CMOS
technology, isn´t it?
Have a look to this comment about E-3 RAW headroom. (dpreview)
Experience tells us that there is typically around 1 EV (one stop) of
extra information available at the highlight end in RAW files and that
a negative digital exposure compensation when converting such files
can recover detail lost to over-exposure.
The E-3 is unusual in that there isn't a great deal of headroom in the
raw files; you can pull back the highlights (by applying negative
exposure compensation) but in reality the results are rarely worth the
effort; you still get around 9 EV of dynamic range, and there's very
little extra information at the highlight end (we'd guess that maybe a
third of a stop would be a fair assessment).
Whilst this limits the usefulness of raw for dealing with exposure
(specifically over-exposure) issues it does at least mean that Olympus
is putting almost all the dynamic range the sensor is capturing into
its JPEG files, which is unusual.
Finally we shot the E-3 in raw mode, under exposing by around 0.7 EV
(2/3 stop). During the raw conversion process we included a +0.7 EV
exposure increase (to bring the exposure back) and made a slight
adjustment to the tone curve to lift the shadows and mid-tones to
match as closely as possible the default tone curve (which is very
similar for all cameras). Note that we tried both ACR and Olympus
Studio 2.0 for the raw conversion and for the purposes of this test
(dynamic range) the results were identical, though they will obviously
depend on how much noise reduction you apply (which will also have an
effect on the amount of detail you see in shadow areas).
As you can see this process does indeed 'bring back' the highlights
and reduce clipping (as would be expected). There is, however, an
overall reduction in dynamic range (to around 7.5 EV total) - mainly
because the shadows end up very noisy (visibly so), even at ISO 100.
With careful processing of raw files you can fine tune the output to
close the gap between the E-3 and the other cameras in this class.
This is the reason I don´t like to underexpose with E-1 to keep safe
the highlights. Noise becomes very coarse.
I think it´s time to measure the real dynamic range of E-1 so this
evening I´ll start to make in the studio some tests. I´ll shoot in
RAW+JPEG for measuring results coming from the camera. (I also want to
see how TruePIC Turbo image processor performs) I´ll also test RAW
headroom with RAW files. I´ll also test 100, 200, 400 and 800 ISO.
I´ll follow this procedure:
http://www.imatest.com/docs/print_dynamic.html
I have got all these charts so results should be pretty accurate.
Let´s see how E-1 performs in spite of these years. It should take me
some days (as I am a little bit busy these days) but I think it´ll be
worth the effort. Suggestions are welcome.
Anyway thank you for all your comments and suggestions.
Dave
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