arbitrage wrote:
Looking at some of the RAWs in LR, the A1 at 25,600 is retaining finer detail than the A7RIV at 12,800. Although the German reviewers really messed up the exposures....I'm not sure why they didn't keep them consistent? So I'm having to make 1/3 or 2/3 adjustments to exposure in LR in order to equalize the settings and that may be throwing off the results as it is the A7RIV files that are underexposed compared to the A1.
Yeah, I downloaded the color chart ISO series and went straight to ISO 100 in hopes of making a comparison of base ISO dynamic range through RawTherapee. I don't think it's possible to do effectively for a few reasons. First, the A1 seems to have been exposed 2/3 of a stop brighter assuming that their ISO 100s are equally sensitive (they might not be, of course). I then opened both RAWs in the editor and found that with RawTherapee defaults the relative saturation levels were way off: the A7RIV file was much more saturated. That made the A1 look superior in terms of shadow noise. I am not an expert with this software but I tried to match them visually, though it was imperfect. I added 3.5 stops of EC to each file and brought back the highlights as much as possible then exported to TIFF to compare.
With all that done, the A7RIV file seemed noticeably cleaner in the blacks of the chart, although they looked very similar in anything colorful like the color checker patches or the bills. That was a bit surprising given the 2/3 stop advantage in shutter speed with the A1, but again there are too many variables. For this reason I hesitate sharing the crops here.
If you have extra time on your hands, thoughts on opening the ISO 100 shots (3428 for the A1 and 8407 for the RIV), disabling NR, and boosting brightness to see how they compare? It would at least help counteract one of the variables in my examination.