Weird Loaner

[Black Pearl]

Sigma came to Sunderland on Friday with all their kit....including their rather unusual cameras. I got chatting to the rep, who I've known for years, and he offered me one of the cameras for a long (ish) term loan. Choice was mine so I went with a dp2 Quattro which has a Foveon X3 sensor and a 30mm f2.8 lens that ends up as a 45mm with the 1.5x crop.

Now if you haven't come across Sigma cameras before - don't worry as few people have - they are a little unusual. Designed by an architect, made for one of the the family owners as a pet project and offered for sale to the public without any intentions of them turning a profit. The sensor is a triple layer affair with every pixel recording every colour, your camera has a grid of red/green/blue pixels. The raw files only open in the Sigma software which is terrible (the rep told me this before I even took the camera) and everything runs at a snails pace. The shape of the dp cameras (there are four as you need a separate one for each focal length offered)  is a bit odd meaning it doesn't sit well in the hand, the controls don't follow a logical placement, the battery is good for less than 200 shots, there's no electronic viewfinder, it doesn't shoot video and the SD card sits behind a rubber cover.

Now I agree I'm not painting this in a good light but I love unusual photographic kit and I love experimenting with new things. I've been out the last couple of days shooting it alongside my Fuji and the experience is growing on me. I love the look of the camera as it is just so mad, the files once you've fought the software are astonishingly detailed and the lens is razor sharp corner to corner.

I'll update as I go along with any further observations and images I shoot them

**click to see full sized for bed results**

The insert is a 100% crop of the extreme bottom right corner of the fame.

[Phil]

Not one for the gear snobs then. Jees, that is ugly!

[johntwo]

I quite like the quirkiness of the design.  You don't hear much about them in the press/on the Net compared to other makes but it certainly seems to perform.  What's it like on a heavy crop BP?  BTW, I really like the reflection shot.

Edited May 7, 2018 by johntwo

[Black Pearl]

3 hours ago, John2 said:

What's it like on a heavy crop BP?  BTW, I really like the reflection shot.

Very sharp with lots of fine detail. The files don't have a great deal of dynamic range and if you push the shadows the noise goes through the roof but if you'e very, very careful with their capture and processing the results are superb.

 

[Black Pearl]

[Black Pearl]

Full sized file...

https://www.flickr.com/photos/16398848@N08/40147195540/sizes/o/

 

[Ryewolf]

It's certainly a bit of an oddity - and quite expensive too at around £600+ mark on Amazon - so maybe it would appeal to the gear snobs as something quirky and unusual...

[vanguard]

I’ve seen them advertised, but never seen one in the wild. I’d be interested in knowing how you get on with it.

[JamesT]

Interesting to see the results from one. The principle is hardly new, that's how colour film works. From what you say about the latitude it sounds as if the behaviour is more like colour slide film than colour print film.

From what I have seen they are just as "dishonest" about the number of pixels as conventional (Bayer or X-trans) systems, in that the red and blue pixels are larger than the green, and the claimed equivalent number of pixels is the sum of the number of photosites in all the layers. IMHO the only digital camera where the number of pixels is honest is the Leica Monochrom.

[Black Pearl]

3 minutes ago, JamesT said:

Interesting to see the results from one. The principle is hardly new, that's how colour film works. From what you say about the latitude it sounds as if the behaviour is more like colour slide film than colour print film.

From what I have seen they are just as "dishonest" about the number of pixels as conventional (Bayer or X-trans) systems, in that the red and blue pixels are larger than the green, and the claimed equivalent number of pixels is the sum of the number of photosites in all the layers. IMHO the only digital camera where the number of pixels is honest is the Leica Monochrom.

A bayer sensor with a quoted 20 million pixels has 20 million pixels. The fact that 10 million are green, 5m are blue and 5m red is kind of irrelevant, there are still 20m of them in total. 

 

Now the Foveon X3 Quattro is a different kettle of fish entirely. It has a 19.6 megapixel top layer and two 4.9 megapixel layers beneath. The standard output is 19.6mp (the same as the top layer) but the resolution is reportedly comparable to that from a 39mp Bayer-pattern sensor.

[Black Pearl]

1 hour ago, Ryewolf said:

It's certainly a bit of an oddity - and quite expensive too at around £600+ mark on Amazon - so maybe it would appeal to the gear snobs as something quirky and unusual...

If you think in terms of rivals it quite cheap. A Fujifilm X100f is about £1200 and while it’s a massively more refined machine it’s kind of the same principle - APSC sensor, fixed lens etc. 

[JamesT]

20 hours ago, Black Pearl said:

A bayer sensor with a quoted 20 million pixels has 20 million pixels. The fact that 10 million are green, 5m are blue and 5m red is kind of irrelevant, there are still 20m of them in total. 

It's not really irrelevant when the software converts that to 20 million pixels each with a full RGB value. The actual information content of the image is effectively about 6 2/3 million RGB triples, not 20 million.