Hulyss
I have my ups and downs with the DP0Q - at present I am in the up-mood because for some reason I can't quite fathom it is turning out some good photographs - but I am not exactly an enthusiastic supporter - more a grudging supporter when it works.
However, I do find it hard to work out what is so wrong with the samples in the links you've provided. I'm not trying to talk myself into buying one (I can't afford an expensive disappointment - if I wanted one of those I'd save up for a new M10, ha-ha!) but for a Quattro sensor I have to say grudgingly that the samples look pretty good.
I judge Sigma by the way it resolves patterns, which imho is superior to other sensors. Here are a couple of crops of an area of the two photos SD1 vs SDQH from what I assume is the 85mm art samples. I have concentrated on the white brick siding of the building in the crops.
Click through for full size (about 2MB).
Obviously, these are the original jpegs, cropped to a 1:1 area. The SD1 file is smaller than the SDQH file and I had to resize the SDQH file to the same dimensions as the SD1 crop, 1276x1276 in order to make a side by side comparison. I then saved and uploaded the resulting file which you can click through to (and created a smaller sized one for display here in the forum).
In the samples there is one thing which is obvious. The micro-contrast of the SD1 appears to be superior to that of the SDQH. The white bricks on the SD1 shot, indeed a lot of detail is more definite because of the stronger contrast. However, is that a function of the sensor? The sensor and the lens? Or the settings in the camera of the photographer? It is difficult to say. If we accept that the SD1 sensor handles contrast better then other than that I find that the IQ of the images is close enough to be the same. And either sensor produces more detail than I have seen in all but one Bayer-sensor camera I have ever owned.
The 'all-but-one' is my Leica Q which produce damn fine detail on a par with my Merrill DPxMs. This was not the case, for example with my Sony A7R and A7S bodies, or my current Panasonic GX8 and GX80 bodies - nor would you expect it from a m43rds sensor but you might have expected it from the Sony FF sensors. So, well done Leica. Even so, in a shoot out with my DP3M vs the Leica Q I have found the DP3M to be as good and better which is a pretty good result for a camera which costs 4.5 times less than a Leica Q!.
But back to the SDQH, I don't think these results show the SDQH to be radically poorer than the SD1. There are issues with micro-contrast which my DP0Q also struggles with on an indeterminate basis (in other words I can't work out why sometimes the results are perfect and other times they are not).
Are the results here are not influenced by the camera settings rather than the sensors? Is my comparison valid? What do others think?
LouisB
PS Please do not re-post my example as it would not be fair to the original photographer.