5D MKII samples by Vincent Laforet

[david_amberson1]

These images are captured form the Movie he shot. He stated that when he originally started. These are just screen

captures from Reverie. He stated he had no still shots to show. Also, these are also described as in camera JPEGS

so they would naturally be softer than usual. Everyone, dont jump the gun just yet. I'm sure once someone gets the

camera and does some real "Still" image tests, it will come back with very good results. I've seen some from the

1DsIII that are unbelievably sharp. But they were shot with the best lenses and good enough shutter speeds and

f/7.1 aperture to tell. I'm sure the new sensor will be that good.

 

Look at this image. I dont know how it will post, but you can copy it and it will work.

 

http://ftp.robgalbraith.com/public_files/EOS-1Ds_Mark_III_Coach.jpg

 

The detail in the eyes and mouth area are absolutley breath taking. SHARP! But the lens used made the difference.

The lenses Vincent used are good, but not as good as a 500 f/4. The lenses he used are close to wide open and are

all noted for being a little soft in that range. The 500mm is sharp all over. And you can see what that sensor is

capable of. Everybody, just wait. Bottom line, we know it will produce the best results you can buy in 35mm format.

If you need more, you need about $40,000.

[hawkman]

"These images are captured form the Movie he shot"

 

Wrong, these are still images, movie is 1920X1080 pixels, a still frame from a movie is highly compressed and useless. You should also note that when you capture a still, i.e. press the shutter bottom during movie capture, camera stops and takes a normal photograph. no difference in quality whatsoever.

[david_amberson1]

Just quoting what he said in his initial test. That all images shown on his site are movie captures. I understand what the movie resolution is.

[jamie_robertson2]

David,

 

These are indeed actual photographs, not movie captures. How else did he quote the shutter speeds of 1/15 sec etc? I remember reading on his blog that he was taking a few photos during the shoot.

[hawkman]

"Just quoting what he said in his initial test. That all images shown on his site are movie captures. I understand what the movie resolution is."

 

I think you are confusing two separate case

 

1) A still capture from a movie, i.e. basically pausing the movie and saving a frame, the will be a heavily compressed 1920X1080 image which will also suffer from motion blur artifacts etc. this is obviously not the case here and it will be of no use

 

2) pressing the shutter button to capture a still when camera is recording a movie clip, in this case camera will take a normal photograph as intended just like normal operation mode.

 

Whether Vince captured stills during shooting a movie clip or not it makes no difference in terms of IQ

[david_amberson1]

Arash> I know how all of this works. What I'm saying, he said that he was posting images from video capture. I also

see some of those images posted here. OK, maybe not all of them, but I do see some. No need in explaining

something so easy to understand.

 

And yes it does matter. You can grab stills out of a movie clip(already taken), which will indeed have lower resolution.

 

This wasnt my biggest point anyway. My point was more in relation to lens choice to effect sharpness. Regardless

whether he's shooting a movie or still's, the lens choice wasnt the best for showing what the sensor is capable of.

The softness you see is "In-Camera" JPEG and lenses in the soft aperture range. Not sensor or even NR issues. I

have seen much better results at same ISO's using 135 primes etc. These 50 1.2L/85 1.2L are known for softness

under f2.8. There's no arguing that statement. I'm not saying they are not good, but can not shown sensor capability

in that range..

[hawkman]

"And yes it does matter. You can grab stills out of a movie clip(already taken), which will indeed have lower resolution."

 

David, I am not going to debate this issue any further, if you really think these 21 mpixel images are stills from a video clip I have nothing more to add-I am sorry.

[hawkman]

Keil,

Good job with the FFT spectrum, the frequency response indicates spectrum has been equalized, due to processing or NR. you can run FFT on red, green and blue channels seperately and find there is strong corrolation factor, indicating chroma NR. but this is obvious by just looking at the pictures, there is no noise in the dark uniform areas, these areas will normally have noise due to nonuniformity in sensor dark current, so there is NR for certain and it has taken its toll on low contrast detail, but the counter argument is that users of this camera will most likely shoot in RAW so we have to see how much detail DPP can recover from RAW, I don't care about JPEG that much.

BTW, did you write the matlab code yourself or is this a standard toolbox?

 

Regards,

Arash

[sven keil]

Hi Arash,

 

thanks...yes, the whitening algorithms were devised by me and previously used to connect natural image statistics

with face image processing in humans (described in Proc Biol Sci. 2008 Sep 22;275(1647):2095-100, or

http://arxiv.org/abs/0804.0759).

 

To all:

 

It was suggested above that the softness derives from lens softness...however, I also mentioned above that I

discovered a hot pixel in the sample images which was blurred, and this points to noise reduction. I usually do

not use NR, and the hot pixels I saw in my cases were crisper. Furthermore, in the black areas of the images one

should at least see some fine-grained noise at iso 1600 if there were no NR, but instead one sees film-grain-like

structures and big (blue) color blobs. This also could be interpreted as being a consequence of NR. The spectra

show also that there is nearly no high-frequency content in the images...so where has the noise gone? Of course

these are speculations, but at least I have threefold evidence to support my claims.

[keith_lubow]

It's a 5D with some modifications. Why would you need to look at sample photos? You know exactly what they are going to look like...any other photo.

[sven keil]

Hello again,

 

>Look at this image. I dont know how it will post, but you can copy it and it will work.

>http://ftp.robgalbraith.com/public_files/EOS-1Ds_Mark_III_Coach.jpg

 

Yes, this indeed seems a good & sharp image. It was taken at ISO200 (according to the image legend), and in this case no NR is necessary. Nevertheless, for pixelists like me, in the hair you see nice interpolation artifacts (from interpolation of the missing colors from the Bayer pattern), but I think at the moment this simply represents the state-of-the-art in image processing...at least I never saw benchmark images with hair with the latest published algorithms :-)

[david_amberson1]

MS, this is what I was talking about. Its all in the lens. Its as good as it gets. Complaining about the IQ from that shot(the one linked) is pointless. You wont find better in 35mm format. For those that find this is not good enough, there's no way to make you happy.

[markonestudios]

Keil: "I just did a quick spectral analysis... application of a 4-term Blackman-Harris Fourier window to reduce

tiling artifacts)."

<p>Arash: "Keil, Good job with the FFT spectrum...noise due to nonuniformity in sensor dark current, so there is

NR for certain and it has taken its toll on low contrast detail...BTW, did you write the matlab code yourself or

is this a standard toolbox?"

<p>Keil: "...the whitening algorithms were devised by me and previously used to connect natural image statistics

with face image processing in humans"

<p>Eureka! A spectral analysis coded by a face recognition software expert was just the final piece I needed to

complete the

answer to my quagmire (5DMkI vs 5DMkII). I've now made up my mind to go for a 5DII based on your results ;-)

Sheesh! Here I was thinkin' this is just a humble photographers' forum :)

<p>Mark :]

[hawkman]

"Here I was thinkin' this is just a humble photographers' forum :)"

 

It is a photography forum, however image processing is an integral part of digital imagery, I'm sure back in the film days people had discussions about chemistry of films and development processes, today, it is electrons and image processing that constitute the basis of digital photography.

[chrisjb]

`Eureka! A spectral analysis coded by a face recognition software expert was just the final piece I needed to complete the answer to my quagmire (5DMkI vs 5DMkII). I've now made up my mind to go for a 5DII based on your results ;-) `

 

I`m sorry but I`m at a loss here, how and why would this type of info influence whether you would buy one body over another and at what point would you expect to see a difference? I owned a pro lab and I`ve never heard this sort of talk, tho grew up with film the main analysis was chem & temp, and with photography was the affects of varying light and its effecting the layers of emultion in different films. but most folks just took pics :)