>
> As some of you may know, I extensively shot a Canon 1D Mk II N before
> throwing out all digital, and even though my testing with a friend has
> generally
> indicated that the 1-series had superior colour, tonal separation and
> dynamic range, it
> all-in-all rendered quite similar to the 40D, so I know what you are
> talking about.
>
Thanks for the confirmation that I'm not totally out of the ballpark.
> The recoverable highlights of these cameras are in a completely
> different class to any four-thirds body yet made, though in general the
> colour was not as
> great, it almost always needed a bit of post-processing.
>
Well, those recoverable highlights are rather fascinating. The Canon held
colors better than the Olympus cameras in the highlights, but both color
shifted pretty bad when one of the three color sensors in the array blew
out. Reds turn to yellow, blues and greens are all over the boards.
What really caught me by surprise is the derived colors of magenta, yellow
and cyan. The 40D was able to bring those up a long ways before washing out
compared to the four other digital cameras tested. I'm guessing about 1/2 a
stop more headroom in the derived colors.
It's been done a million times before, but so has what you have done
> already, so it'll be good fun. But you should do it all-analogue - I do
> believe that an all-
> analogue workflow, where one is printing non-linear film on non-linear
> paper, is the only way to show the true "shades" of the film medium.
>
Well, it has been done before, but not exactly in the manner I'm doing it
in. I'm looking for specific ways of seeing the image data. DXO is great and
everything, from a mathematical standpoint, but it doesn't tell you about
the asthetics of the image. For example, at six stops underexposed, a
"normalized" image from the E-1 looks noisy, but has the correct colors,
saturations and contrast. The other cameras? Not so much.
As to the film version of the test... well, I'm hoping to get to that this
weekend with a low-cost roll of Kodak Gold 200. But the film will be scanned
with Vuescan where I can manipulate the scanner exposure somewhat.
Films are an odd lot for this kind of testing. Take Ilford XP2, for example.
The shoulder of that film starts where the toe leaves off. No straight-line
section at all. Supposably, you can squeeze the better part of 20 stops
worth of sensitivity in, but half of those stops have no tonal separation to
speak of. With paper flashing, stand-development and split-grade printing, I
can pull a lot of crud out of the extremes but the mid-tones get squished to
the hilt.
It's a shame my buddies around here don't have OM to EOS adaptors. I'm not
overly impressed with the lens samples I've looked at so far. I have no
doubts that a couple of my Zuikos could slamdunk them. I'd like the
consistency of my own glass.
Alas, I need to buckle down and fire up the darkroom again this weekend.
There is a stack of negatives to be printed for a fellow list member and two
packages that arrived today to do the project with. :)
Life is good and Freestyle loves me.
AG
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