Olympus-OM
[Top] [All Lists]

Re: [OM] GH2 specs! wow!!!

Subject: Re: [OM] GH2 specs! wow!!!
From: Ken Norton <ken@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Fri, 17 Sep 2010 14:54:05 -0500
> 14-54 MFT lens. Fast AF, same speed as E-1 works for me. Please NO CHROMATIC
> ABERRATION!!! A new sensor with the same dynamic range of E-1. (Ken we have
> to publish E-1 dynamic range test!) I think many people will be amazed with
> the results! KODAK is the only one! That´s it!!! I don´t need anything else.


David, as soon as both of us have a few hours to devote to this, let's
do it. I've looked at your charts enough to figure out some of the
information and I know it matches my own experience. Anybody who says
the E-1 lacks dynamic range is severely clue-impaired.

I've ragged on Olympus this week regarding the Penta-E, but the E-1 is
one of those one-of-a-kind cameras with an image-quality, color and
dynamic range which just keeps me asking it for more. When you crank
the colors up, they look natural--they don't go all nuclear on you.

In fact, two nights ago, I was shooting a low-sun lit farmscape with
stormy looking clouds. Way cool. At some point during the processing
in Lightroom, the L1 files took on that in-your-face HDR with
Saturation turned to 11, Ken Rockwell look. I went to back things off
and realized that the settings were flat! With the E-1, scenes like
this only go Rockwellian if I crank the snot out of the settings.  And
this is with RAW files, not JPEGs.

It's funny when you do highlight-recovery with these cameras. The
Minolta A1 has easily the most useful (and necessary)
highlight-recovery of my three cameras, but shadow noise can get nasty
in a hurry. The L1 has excellent highlight-recovery up to a point--but
there is a problem which I'll get to in a second. The E-1 doesn't
allow you to recover quite as much highlight, but where it falls over
the top, it's gentle. Oh, and no matter how dark the shadows are
(black?) if you crank the shadow recovery up high enough you get
perfectly natural colors.

In the world of digital audio, we have a very important tool in our
kit. It's called "dithering". In essence what it does is masks
bit-level distortion and artifacts with noise. If you look at an ISO
100 shot with full tonal gradient taken with the E-1, you'll see noise
at every brightness value. The L1? Clean as a whistle. This is right
in the RAW files--not JPEGs. When you do a highlight recovery, where
the resulting tonal gradient goes from 255 to 254, the L1 is extremely
harsh. With the E-1, you never see that sharp transition because the
image has enough "dither" to it that no two adjacent pixels will have
the same value.

AG
-- 
_________________________________________________________________
Options: http://lists.thomasclausen.net/mailman/listinfo/olympus
Archives: http://lists.thomasclausen.net/mailman/private/olympus/
Themed Olympus Photo Exhibition: http://www.tope.nl/

<Prev in Thread] Current Thread [Next in Thread>
Sponsored by Tako
Impressum | Datenschutz