douglasf13
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 p.1 #15 · a850 vs a900, 1 stop better noise performance? | |
Wayne, you've gotta read the A350 test. "Still, the A350's resolution, combined with Excellent color accuracy (Average Delta E of 6.9) ..." 
I have never meant to imply that the D3x or other cameras are "crappy color cameras." As most internet forums do, we are all obsessing about nuance here. I'm sure you could make a 5Dii file look pretty close at low ISO to an A900 file, and I could make an A900 look pretty close at ISO 3200 to a 5Dii file. That leads me to why these discussions have even come up in the first place. A year or so ago, shooters of all brands were asking (including Sony shooters,)"Why is the A900 relatively noisy compared to the competition?" So I pose the question, why do you think it's the case? Does Sony build bad sensors? Do they not understand image processing? Is it bad hardware around the sensor? Is the noise difference overblown?
Starting right off the bat with the A100, Sony DSLRs have been a bit noisier than the competition, traditionally, and the question has been asked many times as to why Nikon was able to get lower noise out of the same senors. Is Nikon just more tech savvy than a company like Sony, who has been in the digital imaging business from the beginning and inherited DSLR from Minolta? It really wasn't until Iliah Borg, who tests all cameras, but is generally a Nikon shooter in the 35mm world, started testing the A900 for RPP (and then himself,) did the talk of Sony CFAs really come under mass discussion. According to him, Sony CFAs remained similar from the A100 at least through the A900, and that, combined with firmware programming, has given the A900 the best color around. Unfortunately, something like color is a much more nuanced issue than even high ISO noise, so all we have is a bizarre amalgamation of anecdotes and Iliah Borg statements about it. I'm not sure comparison photos would be much help, since then processing routines and lenses add a gigantic variable, but I'd surely welcome them. FWIW, Wayne, many of the users that you mention as being newly biased to Sony are current dual users, not converts. Quite a few people own both the D3x and the A900, Iliah included. I also know quite a few dual D700 and A900 users.
At the end of the day, it seems to me that some Canon and Nikon users refuse to accept that Sony is good at anything IQ wise. It seems to be common knowledge that Nikon has better shadow noise than the A900, or the 5Dii has better high ISO than the A900, but once slight color advantages of the A900 are mentioned, it's heresy. Iliah Borg uses spectrophotometers to test, and even removes sensor toppings, and I'd have a hard time doubting his method, as RPP is as good as it gets in the realm of demoisacing and color transforms. So, I certainly think that the A900 has a narrower-cut CFA than the competition, and that leads to more amplification and noise at higher ISO, but I'll just leave it up to other people to decide if the color is better and whether that is an appropriate trade off. I'm sure that Iliah would gladly talk about this in detail if you emailed him directly. His email is available on dpreview.
p.s. I should also mention that Iliah may not even be shooting the A900 much anymore. Last time I heard, he was considering replacing its primary uses with the M9 if the color was close, but he was still testing the M9's color, and I never heard the result.
Edited on Dec 18, 2009 at 04:21 PM · View previous versions
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The only way to know is to see for yourself!
