5D MKII samples by Vincent Laforet

make of them whatever you will,

http://www.usa.canon.com/dlc/controller?act=GetArticleAct&articleID=2128

Interesting, they all look soft or slightly out of focus. Wonder if that's a problem with the autofocus not working correctly or of Canon using too strong of an AA filter.

Are tese actual photo captures? or capturres from the video mode?

I checked a couple of shots. The TS shot and the 50/1.2 shot have a lot of camera movement in them making them very soft. A lot of the shots are in low light so I suspect many of them could be soft. The 85/1.2 L shot has extremely narrow depth of field and focus is somewhere on the chin (centre of face) rather than the eye. So eyes and ears are soft but stuble on chin is very sharp. All of these images are poor for evaluating sharpness. They may be useful in evaluating bokeh but I have already lost interest in the subject matter.

"Are tese actual photo captures? or capturres from the video mode?"

 

These are 21 mpixel still images, video stills are about 2 mpixel.

"too strong of an AA filter." I doubt it, as they usually go with a weaker AA, I think it is the SW noise reduction that is washing out some of the detail, comparing psoted 50D RAWs and JPEGs looks like Canon updated their image processing engine with D!GIC4 which now includes rather strong noise reduction compared to what they had before...

Not a camera test more a lens test.

I`d agree John, lot of camera shake, 1/5th sec wide open another 1/20s, nothing to benchmark here :)

I agree entirely. I have followed Vincent's work on Reverie with the 5D2 all the way through. The shutter speeds on these examples are way too low to be meaningful samples for evaluation. The guy was making a film under immense working pressure, taking photos were the last thing on his mind at the time. The movie was utterly exceptional and shoes the powerful capability of the 5D2 but we need to look elsewhere for good sample photographs.

"lot of camera shake, 1/5th sec wide open " I think he was using a tripod, otherwise the photo would be blurry as hell.

`I think he was using a tripod, otherwise the photo would be blurry as hell.`

 

Hi Arash, I`m not sure what you mean on blurry as hell. I just grabbed an old 20d and an ef135 SF lens, its almost dark, 100iso 1/4sec f2.8 and took a pic of my front door 20+ feet away in std jpeg, hand held and is as expected a lil soft (just normal USM for AA filter.:)<div></div>

100% crop but at 300% the wire seperation is quite clear, I am having an issue with the lens after a rebuild, I think it needs recalibrating. and I did not work out DOF but is this what you mean as blurry as hell?

 

Thanks<div></div>

Don`t get me wrong Arash, was only slow shutter shots I mentioned could be shallow DOF with others, only so much Vincent could in the short time he had it

 

Cheers

At large apertures such as these, image detail is typically limited by the lens, not the sensor. They look good to me.

These shots illustrate why technique is as important as the gear you use. Any modern DSLR camera mounted on a tripod could have produced similar or superior results with good technique.

Is it possible that this camera can capture 21 MP stills during film shooting? A cool feature but maybe that's asking too much. In any case it would explain some of the blur since all images would then be manually focused.

Chirs JB, your photo is very sharp you must have steady hands, yes it is possible to handhold the camera for 1/4 sec.

"why technique is as important as the gear you use"

I am not sure if you are in a position to question Vince Laforet's technique, do you know who he is?

The near absence of fine-grained noise patterns @1600 in these images point to a rather effective noise reduction. Packing >20MP on a full-frame sensor naturally produces more noise compared to for example 12MPs. At the guy's hair (img #6) you can see blob-like color artifacts...

Just discovered a "soft" red hot pixel over his ear (again image #6)...notice that it is a rather *soft* hot

pixel (camera shake and lens issues naturally cannot account for that of course) - conclusion?!?!

The samples at dpreview.com are much better. Even those, sharp as they are, are improved by minor applications of unsharp mask. Resolution and sharpness are not the same thing.

 

--Lannie

Anders: Yes, you can shoot at full resolution whilst recording video on the 5D2.

 

By the way, look at the shot of the woman's face in silhouette... that one isn't blurred.. he got lucky with that one.

Sorry again - in the image with the red girl this soft red pixel (and another white one) is also present, look also at her dress, shouldn't it be smooth...? I just did a quick spectral analysis across a region of the image which seemed well in focus (see attachement). Attached is the whitenend amplitude spectrum of the green color channel (middle), the other channels look similar except being flatter (original patch 512 x 512 pixeles, DC-part in the image center, whitening by variance, application of a 4-term Blackman-Harris Fourier window to reduce tiling artifacts). The spectrum on the right was computed from a typical normal photograph shown for comparision. As you can see, in the (middle) Canon spectrum there are few other-than-blue colored regions (=OR) beyond the center part indicating the absence of in-focus-details. In the right spectrum shown for comparison, there are ORs at all frequencies (albeit orientated). The Canon spectrum is relatively flat, there is indeed few detail in these images. For me the spectra smell like noise-reduction (speculation!), not so much like motion blur.<div></div>

<i>Any modern DSLR camera mounted on a tripod could have produced similar or superior results with good

technique.</i>

<p>

This isn't quite true. If you look at the exposure data, it becomes obvious that at those apertures and shutter speeds,

with this kind of lighting, considering the potential for subject movement (ie. slower speeds could be used), these are

very good results. Obviously they do not demonstrate the sharpness potential of the camera, but they do illustrate that it

can produce remarkable results in adverse lighting.

<p>

<i>The samples at dpreview.com are much better</i>

<p>

Again, not true. The dpreview.com samples show sharp images, yes, but they're worthless junk as photographs.

Vincent's images are excellent, though not illustrating sharpness.

"Again, not true. The dpreview.com samples show sharp images, yes, but they're worthless junk as photographs."

 

I was addressing the issue of softness raised above, especially near the beginning of the thread.

 

--Lannie