New M Monochrome

[Gus Lazzari]

<blockquote>

<p>"One of film’s most useful attributes is, for me, the way it gently rolls off the highlights in an overexposed area" <strong><em>Egor</em></strong></p>

</blockquote>

<p>Film lovers are certainly appreciative of his comment at the end of such exhaustive testing of these three great digital cameras (of course with a stellar lens).<br />As evidenced by the incredible performance of the new M246, in certain <strong>difficult</strong> image making situations, digital vs. film performance narrows to a point never seen...</p>

[Brian1664876441]

The histograms that I get from the M Monochrom jpeg converted images do not show the comb structure of the one

shown from the M246. I can speculate that the 12-bit image was stretched a good bit to produce an 8-bit histogram as

shown.

 

I see banding in High-ISO images at ISO 12,500 and 10,000 with the M246. The original M Monochrom has Gaussian

noise, but does not show banding if you take some care in selecting slower SD cards. I use Sandisk 8GByte 4x cards.

 

Gaussian noise is easily and effectively corrected using LR noise reduction with the 14-bit image. The correlated

banding in the M246, not as easy to correct in the 12-bit image. I suspect that the camera's firmware is truncating the

14-bits to 12-bits and then clipping the black levels to ultimately give the range 0-3750 in what was originally a 14-bit

number coming off the A/D. The whote level in the DNG is set to 3750, the black level is set to 0. The images are

processed, the original M Monochrom stores close to Raw data.

 

What is going to happen as more cameras get released- some cameras will be worse than others, and some shooting

conditions will be worse than others. Sensors double noise level "about" every 5~6 degrees centigrade. If the noise level

shows up as fixed-pattern noise. it will be noticeable.

 

I would use a slow memory card and avoid use of Liveview when shooting at High ISO with the M246. Also turn off your

cell-phone and I-Watch. Just an added bonus, peace, quiet, and no distractions as you shoot.

[Ian Taylor]

<p><em>"Now if there was just a quality way to convert the digital file to film for enlarging that would help those of us who are still hanging on to darkroom photography."</em><br>

Salgado converts digital to a physical neg, so there is definitely a "quality way".<br>

</p>