Thanks for all the comments. I should have given a summary of findings in this forum rather than simply linking out to Serious Compacts.
Interesting reading, thanks for posting this. Also interesting to hear Canon's reason (excuse?) for not making a wider zoom.
My own experience with a new G9 over the last week is that in a best-case situation (low ISO, lens stopped down a bit) resolving power is quite impressive. However once you move away from ideal conditions detail gets lost in noise and softness. Again, not surprising really.
Lars
Thanks Lars. I need to find the reference for that comment about Canon and not going wider than 35mm. I'm pretty sure I read it in a Chuck Westfall interview, but I will go back and locate it. That is something I should have referenced.
Fascinating Amin
Perhaps not so surprising though.
Thank you for doing all the work.
Thanks for taking the time to look and comment Jono. Yes, not terribly surprising, though I think that the results would be rejected outright by the most active posters in the DPR Sigma forum.
Thanks for your time and very objective testing.
I just wonder if the G9 images have more sharpening than the others. This is what I felt especially in the last cut-out showing the car. The more noise, as expected from a small CCD, might have been increased too, with this more sharpening choice of the manufacturer.
Thanks again.
Seyhun
Hi Seyhun, that is a good point. This is the crop you are referencing, in case others are interested:
The G9 and D-LUX3 were processed identically from RAW, getting the same sharpening in Lightroom and subsequently in Photoshop. Thus the sharpening should be similar unless one of the companies has applied sharpening (or blurring) to the RAW file or Lightroom is handling the files differently at a given level of sharpening. There is some evidence that Panasonic may have applied some noise filtering directly to the D-LUX3 RAWs, but Canon has denied applying sharpening on-chip in any of their recent cameras (another Chuck Westfall interview I should find and reference).
I should mention, though the D-LUX image was slightly (109%) upscaled, so perhaps it should have gotten more sharpening to adjust for this. I tried to gauge sharpening according to the prominence of halos. For example, along the diagonal edge of the upper left border of the taller receptacle in this crop -
- it seems to me that the halos are similarly pronounced in the G9 and D-LUX crops. Likewise, I tried to gauge how much sharpening to give the DP1 by how prominent the halos were. This was harder, because Sigma Photo Pro (SPP) creates halos at the default level of sharpening, and I couldn't set SPP sharpening too far negative without others thinking that I was intentionally removing detail. I chose a level of -0.4, which does not remove detail, but also does not completely eliminate halos. Any halos present prior to upsizing are magnified by Genuine Fractals, so my leeway to give final stage sharpening to the DP1 image was somewhat hampered.
That said, perhaps the G9 samples are more sharpened. However, sharpening the D-LUX3 and DP1 files further, while closing the gap in apparent detail somewhat, does not bring them to the level of the G9 in this area.
Regards,
Amin
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