thw2 wrote:
timbop wrote
Overall, it really looks like RG's samples intentionally make both the 5 and 7 look bad. Not saying RG has an agenda, but those samples are really bad. Actually, I'm sure that is RG's intention. He has also been slamming Canon's AF all this while. Not sure what happened... maybe something like what Phil Askey went through (they didn't provide him an advance copy of the 1D3 for early preview).
I've worked with RG on a professional basis, and while we have not spoken in a couple of years, I do not for a minute believe that he has any kind of anti-Canon agenda. He's a professional journalist by training, and his articles have always been much better researched and more objective in tone than some other sites I could name.
I simply think that in this case, he has applied chroma NR in DPP, but has done little or no luma NR on the files. The results he's gotten would be consistent with that practice in my experience.
Some people just philosophically prefer to do minimal destructive processing to the files, and accept some luminance noise as being similar to film grain. I know for a fact that RG used to turn off his in-camera noise processing and sharpening in favor of a more normalized post-processing workflow.
But until he discloses more details about his workflow it's hard to say one way or another what has occurred. I'd hold out for more data points.