Messages

1

EOS Bodies - For Stills / Re: New Canon 5D Mark III

« on: May 19, 2013, 06:44:04 AM »

Wow; you've obviously been saving your pennies.

I bet you're really enjoying that nice big viewfinder image, and I expect you'll have lots of fun with your excellent new camera.

Have fun!

2

EOS Bodies / Re: Any news on the SL1 sensor?

« on: May 14, 2013, 08:53:40 AM »

I don't think anyone was seriously expecting the 7D2's sensor to be in the 100D.

I, at least, just wanted to know whether it was (as far as high ISO performance is concerned) just basically the same as the 4-year-old 7D sensor, or whether the 100D's sensor showed a noticeable improvement.

3

EOS Bodies / Re: Any news on the SL1 sensor?

« on: May 13, 2013, 07:15:36 AM »

Yes, I used the Comparometer (TM) to compare the 100D's high-ISO noise at 6400 to that of the 7D.

The difference was pretty much imperceptible. Maybe slightly better from the 100D in some areas of the picture, but honestly - was it any better to any useful extent? No.

So the 100D does seem to be just another outing for the 4-year-old sensor in the 7D, at least in terms of high ISO performance.

I'll give it a miss then. I might have been interested in it as a more portable body to take out when I didn't feel like taking the 5D3.

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EOS Bodies / Re: Any news on the SL1 sensor?

« on: May 12, 2013, 09:18:47 AM »

I have been wondering the same myself.

Is it a better sensor for high ISO than the old 18MP sensor from the 7D and so many others? Or is it a genuine improvement in it?

5

Technical Support / Re: 6D: reversing the communicate with this battery setting?

« on: May 09, 2013, 02:16:10 PM »

It makes me smile, all these rich people with expensive 5D3 cameras who don't want to pay for Canon batteries.

6

EOS Bodies - For Stills / Re: Mark on pictures using new Canon 1100D

« on: May 03, 2013, 10:18:04 PM »

EXIF is the name of metadata your camera saves about the image, in the JPG files it creates.

So as well as the image itself, your camera creates JPG files that have data about the camera model, lens, exposure time, lens focal length setting, exposure compensation offset, flash mode, white balance, etc. etc..

All of that lot is in the "EXIF data" in the image file.

On most/all computers, if you right-click one of your JPG files, and select "Properties" or similar, you can get to see
the EXIF data.

7

Third Party Manufacturers / Re: Sony 400/4 telephoto on the way....

« on: May 03, 2013, 11:03:28 AM »

See, for example, Very Long Baseline Telescopes.

sorry but aren´t that radio telescopes??

Yes, but there are now optical telescopes using the same principle.

The fact is that if you take a large lens that gives you high resolution because of its large size,
you can paint most of it black and leave odd spots of transparent glass around the edges and, I guess, some dotted around inside, and still get that high resolution.
That's why VLBT telescopes exist; there'd be no point in them otherwise.

It's just that your light grasp becomes rubbish when you paint most of your lens black!

So you have a high resolution, but a RUBBISH T-stop because most of your lens/mirror/desert isn't contributing
signal.

Having said that, I am sure there are Fourier "consequences" of only having odd dots on your lens/mirror/desert contributing. I expect the COC "shape" depends on the FT of the pattern of the dots you have chosen. Or something. I'm straying into hand-waving semi-guesswork here; it's been over 20 years since I did Fourier signal theory at uni.

Having said that, I do have a book entitled "Atlas of Optical Transforms" which is a whole book full of 2-D patterns in real space on one page, and the optical Fourier Transform 2-D on the page opposite, so you can compare them and see how one is related to the other.

Then it goes on to show effects of masking out part of a Fourier transform pattern and how the masking affects the reconstituted-from-Fourier pattern back in real space. So you get low- or high-pass spatial filtering.

Fascinating reading, it is.

8

Third Party Manufacturers / Re: Sony 400/4 telephoto on the way....

« on: May 03, 2013, 10:21:05 AM »

Said to be "affordable for amateurs".

Absolutely no sign of a new 400/4 coming from Canon ie a scaled up version of the superlative 300/2.8 II would be just fine - very little R&D required!. With slightly smaller aperture it would be slightly lighter and approx same price.

So, is the contention is that a ~$6K lens would be "affordable for amateurs"?  Or will the Sony lens just be a lot cheaper? If so, how? A 400/4 will need a 100mm front element just like a 200/2. Will they change the laws of physics (or economics)?  Make the elements out of plastic?  I just can't see a 400/4 being "affordable". Or maybe they'll take a page from the Pentax book and label the lens with a 'crop factor adjusted' focal length, i.e. try to market a 267mm f/4 lens for APS-C as a real 400mm lens, or maybe a 200/4 for their NEX cameras. 

Well, to get the resolution of an f/4 lens, you don't actually need the whole 100mm diameter front element to be
there. See, for example, Very Long Baseline Telescopes.

Maybe you could get away with a few small transmitting "zones" around the edges of the notional 100mm lens that's mostly opaque, and perhaps a few dotted around elsewhere to smooth out the Fourier nastiness that might result (I'm guessing this part.).

So you could end up with a lens that has the resolution of a f/4 100mm front element, but with a HORRENDOUS T-stop of f/(hundreds) because of the rubbish light grasp of the mostly-opaque 100mm "lens".

9

EOS Bodies - For Stills / Re: 6D viewfinder too big ?

« on: April 24, 2013, 11:00:28 AM »

No, it's not. At 0.71x magnification 100% coverage viewfinder will be bigger than 97% coverage viewfinder. 6D and 5D3 both has 0.71x magnification viewfinders. APS-C cameras have smaller magnification, 7D, for example, has 0.63x, 50D has 0.59x.

The specs I read (Canon's own 7D brochure) say the 7D viewfinder is 1x magnification and 100% coverage.
Or do you mean that the 7D viewfinder is only 0.63x the size of the 5D/6D?

Yes, the 7D's magnification is either 1 or very close to it. You can put a 50mm lens on it and things look pretty much exactly the same size as they do through your other eye; in fact you can still have proper binocular vision with 1 eye looking through the finder and the other not.

That is definitely not the case with the 5D; its magnification is far lower.

As I say, my film camera does have 1x magnification, and is still (obviously) full-frame, so its viewfinder size is enormous compared to that of the 5D.

10

EOS Bodies - For Stills / Re: 6D viewfinder too big ?

« on: April 23, 2013, 03:45:45 PM »

Even the 5D3's viewfinder image is small compared to old-style film SLRs' viewfinder images.

My Olympus OM2SP's viewfinder image is much larger. I wish the 5D3's image were that size!

I think the OM2SP's image magnification is about 1.0X, whereas the 5D3's is quite a lot less than that.

But the 5D3 has to fit other things like digital readouts underneath the image; maybe that's why they made the actual image area smaller.

11

Technical Support / Re: MacBook Pro : Best RAW Processing Software?

« on: April 17, 2013, 05:37:29 PM »

Thanks for all your advice.

I've downloaded the LR5 beta, and I'll have a play with it.

12

Technical Support / Re: MacBook Pro : Best RAW Processing Software?

« on: April 16, 2013, 07:24:52 PM »

Sorry, I don't know how to post the pictures full-size on here, because the site only allows up to 4MB files, and the full-size jpgs are much bigger than that.

You can't see much difference between the above 2 pictures, because they've been reduced in size so much, but on the big computer monitor, the RAW-converted images is sharper and I've played with the levels a bit to make the image have more "pop", to me, anyway.

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Technical Support / Re: MacBook Pro : Best RAW Processing Software?

« on: April 16, 2013, 07:20:40 PM »

And here's the SOOC jpg.

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Technical Support / Re: MacBook Pro : Best RAW Processing Software?

« on: April 16, 2013, 07:19:53 PM »

I've been running LR4 on 30 day trial this evening.

Here's the result of the photo I've been working on.

15

Technical Support / MacBook Pro : Best RAW Processing Software?

« on: April 16, 2013, 12:00:25 PM »

Hi.

I've just upgraded my computer system to a 13" MacBook Pro Retina 3GHz and a 27" 2560x1440 monitor.

I haven't really done RAW processing before. Now my new computer is all set up, I've installed DPP onto it, and updated it to version 13.3.

But I have the impression that people here mainly use other software for their RAW processing.

I have heard people talk here about "Aperture" (I believe it is Apple software?), and Lightroom.

Which is best? I have a 5D3. How much do they cost?

I have had a quick play in DPP with sharpening a couple of pics, and I was impressed by the result. Much better than the SOOC jpg. I set sharpness to 0 on the 5D3, to get rid of those "black dot in the centre of small bright points" problem (IIRC). There was a nasty sharpening artefact problem with in-camera sharpening.

So. Which RAW software should I use? I have a feeling that the serious people seem to use "Lightroom"; is that so? If so, why?

Thanks.