 Peggy Wolff |
Sigma SD10 Compared to Film Cameras Help! I think I am ready to go digital but am so confused! In the past 6 months I have broken 2 of my good lenses, so it is no longer really important that I stay with the Cannon EOS line, however I do love my EOS 35 mm. I just saw an add for the Sigma SD10 and it looks like a great camera but I don't know anything about them and no one seems to have one that I can look at. It is a 10.2 MP camera but has a FOVEON X3 system that I have never heard of. I guess this is 3 layers of pixel sensors stacked up so that there is over 3 MP of blue, red and green? When I looked at another website that compared cameras, and how large you can blow them up to it did not look like it measured up to other larger pixel cameras... more like a 4 MP camera. Hoverever I know that Sigma had the best lens of the year last year and has great professional lenses. The camera is only $1,500 with 2 lenses (non prof lenses). Does anyone know anything about these cameras? With almost ever photo shoot that I do, I sell a 20x24, so it is VERY important that I have a camera that can do this. I also work fast because I do a lot of toddlers and I like shooting them in action. The website I got the info on is Sigma-photo.com. Also, does anyone know how these MP add up to 35 mm? For instance is a 5 MP considered as good as a 35 MM and 10, a medium format? I need direction!
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Tim Devick |
Margaret, From what I've read in magazines and on-line, it sounds to me like the Sigma SD10 is a good idea whose implementation is not quite ready for prime-time. I've read that the picture quality and color balance are not as good as expected. The Canon EOS 10D seems to be the hot camera right now and arguably the best of the digital SLRs. As far as comparison between digital and 35mm, there is a big discussion on this other places on this web site. Some say that a good digital camera is as good as 35mm, while others say it is not. However, without interpolation software (resampling in PhotoShop or using a tool like Genuine Fractals), you cannot enlarge a digital image to 20x24 and get good prints. Interpolation means the software basically adds more pixels by making an educated guess about what the new pixels should look like based on the surrounding pixels. None of the current batch of consumer or semi-pro digital cameras comes close to matching medium format film. You can buy a digital back for your medium format cameras, but they cost almost as much as a nice new car! I've never used a digital back, but if anyone here has please let us know what you think of it. For the sake of argument, let's assume that 5MP is close to 35mm in quality. A piece of 35mm film is roughly an inch by an inch and a quarter in size. A medium format negative would be something like 2 1/4 inches square (or a bit larger, depending on the camera format). In this example, the MF film is 5x the area of the 35mm film (5x larger). To get twice the number of pixels in a 5MP camera, you need to have not 10MP but 20MP (think of it as twice as many pixels horizontally and twice as many vertically). So, to get 5x the pixels of the 5MP camera, you need not 25MP, but 50MP.
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Peggy Wolff |
Tim, thank you so much for your responce, it was very helpful. I would love the Cannon 1DS but that isn't going down enough either. Although, I have seen at digital liquidators it is down around $6,000. It is still out of my price range. I just don't want to go digital until I know I can use it for my business. It looks like I may be waiting awhile longer. I am surprised that the D10 didn't go down at all in price since last year. Maybe in another year the digital SLR's will start going down in price. Thank you so much for your responce!
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- Gregory LaGrange Contact Gregory LaGrange Gregory LaGrange's Gallery |
I haven't tried but what if you shoot everything in RAW files? Didn't that give you a large enough file that you could make 20x30 blow-ups?
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Tim Devick |
Well, print image quality is tied more directly to the number of pixels in your image than file size. Even if you start from a TIFF file, you have the same number of pixels in your image; the TIFF will be slightly better quality because it isn't compressed, but the number of pixels in your image hasn't changed. The recommendation for printing seems to be to keep the number of pixels per inch close to 300 (although I have printed 250 pixels/inch and got nice looking prints). If you start with a 5MP image and print it at 18x24, you will get 107 pixels/inch in your finished print. If you print at 20x26, you'll get about 96 pixels/inch. This is about a third of the pixel density recommended for a good print.
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Gregg Vieregge |
Have you looked into the Fuji S2 pro? It has come quite a bit in price. I have been shooting professionally with it for two years and I am very satisfies. I normally shoot at the factory default settings of 6.13 in JPEG but can go up to TIFF and Raw At 12. The JPEG's gives me fast downloading and the 20x24 I print look great.
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Peggy Wolff |
Greg, I have to admit, I haven't looked at the fugi much. Maybe because I have had EOS's since I started shooting. Thank you so much for the recommendation, I just looked at digitaliquidators.com and it is down to $1,400. Sounds like a great deal. How do you like the lens's? Thank you for your insight. Peggy
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