sebboh wrote:
hmm, for landscape i think i would prefer the contax on the µ4/3 camera to the that panaleica (you could have shot it at 35mm on µ4/3 and 70mm on the 5Dc). if you had compared the canon 85/1.8 to the olympus 45/1.8 i think it would be pretty close. also, what aperture? after f/5.6 you can visibly see the pixels get softer due to diffraction on the gh2 if i recall correctly.
Almost certainly I shot m4/3 at f/5.6 and FF at f/8. I don't usually change those settings toooo much.
I need to figure out the sweet spot for RX100, probably something like f/4.
What I noticed about detail is that if you are lacking it to begin with, once you downsize, etc. I felt like there was a loss of tonality and contrast in those areas of the photo. Not necessarily anything you'd notice unless the prints were side by side, but so what. I geek out sometimes. I put on the big librarian glasses and look wayyyy too close at pixels or prints. Sue me.
I think the fence by the waterfall and the other leaf might be good...it's the really close stuff where the CV has really strong glow...I expect the PL 42.5/1.2 to perform much better in this regard.
I think the point is, given good glass and decent lighting, it's quite difficult to spot right off what format took what picture. Is this m4/3, APS-C or full frame? (you can look at EXIF, but the point is that upon first glance it's more or less irrelevant nowadays until you really start blowing up big, shoot in really hard situations, or really need that FF look....
JMan, thanks for presenting this, I've enjoyed it.
Kudos to your model, by the way; I use subjects such as trees, and sometimes I can't convince even them to stay in the same place.
I'm still thinking over how the format differences cause the different catch-light rendering between formats. That there's a relationship between the absolute aperture (not f-stop, but 50/2.8, 35/2, and 25/1.4, or roughly 18mm) and the format size, which affects rendering aside from brightness and depth of field, is an idea I hadn't seen in the format-equivalence discussions I've seen so far. I still haven't wrapped my head around it, but I'm grateful for this prompt for thought. So, again, thanks.
Jman13 wrote:
I think the fence by the waterfall and the other leaf might be good...it's the really close stuff where the CV has really strong glow...I expect the PL 42.5/1.2 to perform much better in this regard.
I think the point is, given good glass and decent lighting, it's quite difficult to spot right off what format took what picture. Is this m4/3, APS-C or full frame? (you can look at EXIF, but the point is that upon first glance it's more or less irrelevant nowadays until you really start blowing up big, shoot in really hard situations, or really need that FF look....
How about these? This is a mix of FF, m4/3, and APS-H...which is which?
i thought the fence and waterfall was one of the most obvious ones because it has all the aberrations of a superspeed lens as does you first example here. the rest i have no idea, they are stopped down far enough where differences would be very hard to spot at websize (or possibly at all depending on the cameras). that was my point – you can make a really well corrected f/2 lens for FF but it's a lot harder to make a really well corrected f/.95 lens for 4/3. they all end up looking the way f/1.2 lenses do on FF, not in terms of dof, but in terms of aberrations.
miguel_13 wrote:
Meaning I suppose that the optics were manipulated to 'fool you' into not being able to identify the different sensors?
Even more fun would be to use a true random sample of subjects and see if they did any better than the experts in a photography forum.
"Manipulated to fool" ... no, not at all. I just meant that I agree that the same physical apertures yield the same dof. This "removes" one variable that then makes it more difficult to detect the dof "tell" that we so readily recognize when comparing f-stops across formats rather than physical apertures across formats.
Nothing afoul here, just appreciation for Jordan's presentation ... one @ same physical aperture (that 90% of us got wrong to some degree), one @ same f-stop (that probably 90%-100% of us would have gotten correct).
Jman13 wrote:
For this test, it doesn't conclusively prove much of anything....this test doesn't really stress the limits of these cameras, but it is interesting to see that for a typical shot, people can't generally tell what format of camera took a picture. This is especially true in my experience when you are just looking at any random image...the image quality of modern cameras is really good at most levels...it's only at the extremes where quality differences really start to stand out. Of course, there are other benefits to larger formats...shallower depth of field, availability of specialty lenses like tilt/shift, etc....
Really interesting test. The picture I thought was FF was actually m43.
I read it after voting, voted m4/3, FF, APS-C, why?
Im used to ghastly skintones of m4/3s (made mistake as you are using Olympus, not Panasonic ). Also bit of focal length deformation.
FF - quite easy, most natural mix of perspective and proportions.
APS-C .. thought Fuji has nice skintones.
At first I thought as it was right, cause last pic contains most background surroundings, so it must be smallest sensor + widest lens, but those colors suprised me..
I wont tip newer pics as there isnt much to go by. Plus difference between APS-H and FF is pretty much impossible to find. If you shot it with something longer than comparsion its again more complicated. After 50mm and decent distance from subject, its harder to make a difference.
One thing where difference can be quite obvious is landscapes (especially if its wide-angle one). But people shots, these are hard..
Theres a guy on 500px, which shots exlusive m4/3 and 45/1.8 and when I first saw his pics, I thought he is using something very different to that. But he shoots mostly people, so its bit hard to guess..
SKumar25 wrote:
The test had the larger format lenses stopped down. If the test was repeated with all lenses WO, then the results would be quite different.
Yes, then they would all be @ different physical aperture sizes ... same as Jordan already posted in the follow up set with the same f-stop and differing dof's. See Pg.3 Post #16 where he did repeat with all lenses WO @ f1.4.
I wasn't confident on the two smaller formats but spotted the full frame shot correctly from the qualities of the image, so I guess that means I get to keep my full frame camera, anyone who got that wrong please hand them over
I think some of the anomalies can be attributed to people trying to be a bit too clever and looking too much into noise and colour balance instead of looking at the format specific but sensor independent characteristics.
Anyway it was interesting exercise, it demonstrates the differences between formats can be quite small these days, and also the value of blind testing. At the end of the day format differences mainly come down to lens availability. There happens to be a 25mm f/1.4 lens available for uFT so you could switch from your FF camera at f/2.8 to uFT for that shot and there would be no difference to the untrained eye.
But had you been shooting at a greater distance using a 24mm f/1.4 lens wide open (to isolate the subject a little from the background) then you couldn't swap to uFT and a 12mm f/0.7 lens, because none exist.
Of course. This wasn't a test to see if all formats were equal. It was a test to see if there was really anything to the 'look' of a format (in this one scene).
Just like there are things a full frame kit can do that a small sensor can't, there are size and weight benefits that help the smaller formats do things bigger glass can't (like comprise a full kit from wide to super long and not break my back while maintaining high image quality. )
theSuede wrote:
Good to see I got it right, since I was fairly confident. My base feeling/reasoning was a mixture of:
Jochenb - Pana25 CA
wayne seltzer - by rendering style
And as I said, I was surprised about how much more noise the Canon FF camera had. I've only compared the OM-D with the D800 and D7000 before. But even so, #2 had the most relaxed rendering, the least vignette and the least amount of CA. And the best small-detail contrast, and the smoothest transition in/out of focus. If you had had more light so you could shoot it at longer shutter speeds, it would have been a very easy pick, even at 1600px image size. And you could have shot it with the 120USD 50/1.8 and it still would have bested the fairly expensive Pana-Leica 25/1.4.
BTW, Lightroom does NOT in any way guarantee equal image WB by setting equal WB "temperature" in the controls. How well the set temperature corresponds to reality depends on the camera profile and the light circumstances.
And again, thanks for doing the work with setting up the comparison. This is actually the only way to do it fairly, and any criticism of "fairness" with regards to execution is IMO misplaced since all the necessary information was presented "as is" in the presentation text....Show more →
Yeaa! Glad I was correct too. Thanks Jordan for doing this. Surprised so many here got it wrong. I saw the differences zooming in on the pictures on my Samsung S3 phone. #1 and #3 were closer and I confirmed my picks when I zoomed in on the pics on my Google nexus tablet with better than retina resolution screen.
I just looked at the skin on her cheek and looked which had the most fine detail with a more relaxed rendering as the Suede mentions above. I am used to pixel peeping the differences between similar shots from 7D and my FF cameras like my 1dsm3, D800E, and RX1.
I remember only getting one answer wrong out of the 20+ blind comparisons in Denoir's Zeiss vs Canon lens comparison test here. I only got the tricky macro shot wrong. :-) That test was fun too.
The poor 1ds2's sensor is at least 7 years old compared to these recent tech sensors of the Fuji and Oly.
D800(E) sensor would have much better noise performance at 1600 than the 1ds2 and have even more fine detail in a smoother and even more relaxed rendering.
I see these differences in Ming Thein's blog shots between his Oly OMD shots with his leica m 50 lux vs. his D800E shots or even his home scanned film Hasselblad 500CM shots. When I told him that he said there is no way to tell the difference at web image sizes.
I am wondering what percentage of people who preferred the third image like Sigma DP1? :-)
I read most responses and it seems that anyone who guessed right, did so based on lens characteristics or slight differences in distance or fov. In other words, testing flaws.
"Rendering", "look" and other mythical attributes of bigger sensors had no bearing whatsoever
bkwphoto wrote:
I'm going by size of catch light in the eyes. Medium, small and large in that order. So either go by format size or fstop? I think fstop so aps-c, full frame, and m4/3. But in any case hard to tell.
But why is it so? Abberations? The blur of the light which is out of focus should be identical because the effect of f-stop and sensor size should cancel each other, according to the arrangement of the experiment.
Spyro P. wrote:
"Rendering", "look" and other mythical attributes of bigger sensors had no bearing whatsoever
I am surprised about the m4/3 picture. I see the FF (2.) pic is much clearer than the APS-C (first) which is a bit "muddy". And the m4/3 is better in this regard than APS-C. which may be due to the erroneous WB of the APS-C pic.
Nowadays I shoot primarily with "smaller format" cameras, such as the Fuji X-E1 and the Oly OM-D. I still use my 6D although less than I used to.
The smaller format cameras have gotten better and better in terms of resolution, DR and high ISO performance such that there is becoming little difference compared with with FF. In fact with the high quality lenses that are now available for Fuji X and m4/3 (Fuji 35 1.4, 14 2.8, 18-55, Oly 45 1.8, PL 25 1.4, Pany 7-14, etc) I find that I often get sharper results from my X-E1 and OM-D than my 6D.
The one situation where I still find it difficult for the smaller formats to compete is fast and wide - that wide angle, large aperture look is difficult to replicate with a sensor that is smaller than FF.
And fast and wide is a look that I like. This is one the reasons that I'm interested in trying out the new Fuji 23 1.4 to see if it can compete with the look I get from say my 6D and ZE 35 f/2.......
H.Lux wrote:
But why is it so? Abberations? The blur of the light which is out of focus should be identical because the effect of f-stop and sensor size should cancel each other, according to the arrangement of the experiment.
Stefan
I think it has to do with the fact that the catch light is a mirrored reflection rather than a direct image. Too rusty @ mirror optics to explain atm ... maybe someone else?
I don't usually change those settings toooo much. 
