Analysis of RAW samples at Fred Miranda show weak DR

[ahsanford]

So, we have a serious confirmation from dpreview now:

Should I buy a Canon EOS 6D Mark II?

The areas where the D750 outperforms the 6D Mark II are far greater Raw dynamic range (by around 3 EV more), and a better viewfinder autofocus system. If you're intending to shoot sports or action, the D750 offers both state-of-the-art '3D-Tracking' AF and low light AF capability. The D750 also offers a more sophisticated metering system. It includes modes such as highlight-weighted and spot-metering that's linked to the AF point, and also feeds scene information to the AF system to support with face detection and subject tracking.

(See red bit above)

Stop trolling me, DPR.

I also love the Nikon PR Team DPR stating the DR difference above without any qualification, as if photographers could enjoy that latitude advantage all over the ISO range. :

- A

 

[unfocused]

I see Adobe has added Camera Raw support for the 6DII. It will be interesting to see what kind of results people will be getting with Adobe.

 

[ahsanford]

So, we have a serious confirmation from dpreview now:

But, you did just put 'serious' and 'DPR' in the same sentence. ;D

- A

 

[Khalai]

I see Adobe has added Camera Raw support for the 6DII. It will be interesting to see what kind of results people will be getting with Adobe.

Lightroom is also upgraded to ver. 6.12 with 6D II support.

 

[Aglet]

Thats the whole point of the DR argument, the muddy purple casts with poor colour noise is the issue. As you say from one stop lift which is nothing in a high contrast scene.

Im sorry but you cant 'expose properly' in every scene. For example I shoot a lot of wildlife in rainforrests, you get high contrast shards of light and deep shadows under the canopy. I dont care who you are you cant expose the whole scene you have to try and protect the highlights or the shadows and on the older bodies it was hard work.

The fact you can push these new 6DMKII files more than 3 stops with no banding, muddy purple casts with no colour noise makes it obvious to me there has been huge improvement. Night and day compared to the 5DMKIII just for laughs 100 shadow and +3 on the exposure completely reveals detail with barely any penalty, not that I would do that but the fact if you now can.

good to hear that real files have more real-world latitude than the charts and historical performance of Canon files would imply.

Bad noise character can be much more of a problem than lacking overall DR.

 

[Aglet]

I see the 6DII as a great opportunity.....for a specific handful of folks who've been getting bored with Canon lately. The DR improvements with on-sensor ADC in some recent Canon cameras had apparently left a void in their lives. Take Aglet for example...he's made 75 posts in just the 3 weeks since the 6DII was announced. The 75 posts he made before that spanned a period of 16 months. So, for that particular DRone, the 6DII has resulted in over a 1200% increase in posting frequency. 8)

maybe I've been thinking about buying one... LOL

can you come up with something clever and amusing containing FPN ?
cuz that's really more my bash topic than DR.

 

[raydee]

Canon has had it's moments of idiosyncratic behaviour before, but the release of the 6d2 really sets the bar quite a bit higher in the bullshit department. How in all earth did they think not getting roasted for using an old school off chip ADC sensor in their latest and supposedly highest selling full frame offering? It was so obvious to fail hard reputation wise that they either are oblivious of the desires their userbase has or they just don't care for the sake of market segmentation. Maybe the rumours there would be no successor weren't that far fetched after all, and they just came up with a half assed reply to them...

 

[bclaff]

Bill Claff, care to comment? I can't help but notice the (e) for estimated has disappeared from your site, but it says it hasn't been updated in 8 days.

Is this your actual test data from a production camera? If final/official -- this would be a nail in the coffin on no on-chip ADC in the 6D2, would it not?

Bill bases his analyses on RAW files captured by others, but taken according to his specifications. His estimated (e) curve for the 6DII was based on the random file(s) posted on the internet. He stated that DPR then provided him with RAW files to his specifications, which he analyzed, so the (e) is gone. DPR indicated they were provided with a preproduction camera, so it seems likely that Claff's 'final' analysis is based on RAW files from that preproduction unit. Perhaps Bill will comment.

Yes, "final" (technically numbers are never final at PhotonsToPhotos. For any camera if I get new data the numbers may change.) numbers from a production unit.

 

[bclaff]

Bill Claff, care to comment? I can't help but notice the (e) for estimated has disappeared from your site, but it says it hasn't been updated in 8 days.

Is this your actual test data from a production camera? If final/official -- this would be a nail in the coffin on no on-chip ADC in the 6D2, would it not?

- A

Yes, up-to-date from a production unit. (Failed to update the date when new data was posted. )

 

[Jack Douglas]

The roasting comes when the public isn't buying. CR is nothing much as are reviews that many people don't bother with, so time will tell if it's as bad as the 6D was. The 6D really got roasted on CR! BTW how can the 6D still be around it was such a pathetic camera according to CR postings. I almost didn't buy it after joining and reading.

Jack

 

[hbr]

The roasting comes when the public isn't buying. CR is nothing much as are reviews that many people don't bother with, so time will tell if it's as bad as the 6D was. The 6D really got roasted on CR! BTW how can the 6D still be around it was such a pathetic camera according to CR postings. I almost didn't buy it after joining and reading.

Jack

Same here, Jack. I am so glad that I read all the purchaser's reviews on Amazon and B&H. This time around, though, is a little bit different - First time I ever pre-ordered, (6D2). Hope I am not making a mistake. If so I have 30 days to return it.

Brian

 

[Luds34]

The fact you can push these new 6DMKII files more than 3 stops with no banding, muddy purple casts with no colour noise makes it obvious to me there has been huge improvement. Night and day compared to the 5DMKIII just for laughs 100 shadow and +3 on the exposure completely reveals detail with barely any penalty, not that I would do that but the fact if you now can.

Tom, I appreciate your contributions to this discussion, aka taking the time to really evaluate the RAW images and see what can be done with them.

I think a few people get too caught up in spec sheets and benchmark numbers and lose sight of the big picture, aka all the little things that can't be measured objectively with a numeric score. The dynamic range a sensor/camera is capable of at a certain ISO setting is just one small measurement in the grand scheme of things. I frankly am much more interested in how the noise, color looks, how the image retains quality as one pushes shadows, etc.

Thanks again for your efforts!

 

[bclaff]

...

The fact you can push these new 6DMKII files more than 3 stops with no banding, muddy purple casts with no colour noise makes it obvious to me there has been huge improvement. Night and day compared to the 5DMKIII just for laughs 100 shadow and +3 on the exposure completely reveals detail with barely any penalty, not that I would do that but the fact if you now can.

Yes. I'm attaching a Sensor Heatmap visualization of Fixed Pattern Noise (FPN)at PhotonsToPhotos.
Note that the false coloration is simply to help emphasize patterns.
The 6D has a strong vertical FPN pattern whereas the 6D Mark II does not.

 

[Loswr]

can you come up with something clever and amusing containing FPN ?
cuz that's really more my bash topic than DR.

Fixated on Pushing Nocturnal images?

I can't take credit for this one, but a friend of mine has his Outlook contact group for our small circle named "FPN" which stands for fellow photo nuts.

 

[Dan Borg]

Okay this is my first post here but I have followed this forum for some time... over 5 or so years.

I have been a canon shooter since 2008 using a 450D, 550D, 7D and I'm currently using a 6D so I've been following all of the forums and checking the reviews to see what peoples thoughts are WRT the 6D MKii.

First off I'm not that bothered about shooting video but I do understand everyone’s frustration with the lack of 4K video, however for me it's of no concern... however dual card slots would have been nice!

Anyway I've been really keen to see the RAW files so that we can see what the ISO, noise and dynamic range performance is like, so it's been rather disappointing to see the results of the initial tests, but I really don’t think that a proper analysis can be made until adobe provide RAW support.

Here's my reasoning for this... I’ve noticed that the DPP software doesn’t convert to TIFF properly, basically when you use it for converting to TIFF and then import it into lightroom the blacks are crushed and muddied; here is an example from a photo that I shot on my 6D (cropped section of trees)

.

I exported a 16 bit TIFF (without corrections) from DPPv3, DPPv4 and lightroom; I then imported the TIFFS into lightroom and then set the shadows to +100%; as you can see the blacks in the DPP TIFFs are just mush but the blacks in the TIFF from lightroom have detail.

I've tried to attached a side by side example of my findings

So there’s hope yet for the 6DMKii

I contacted Canon Europe with my findings a year or so ago but nothing was said or done...

 

[Joules]

[...] so it's been rather disappointing to see the results of the initial tests, but I really don’t think that a proper analysis can be made until adobe provide RAW support.

Well, I haven't made any updates yet and haven't downloaded any 6DII raws ... But there should be proper support for the new RAW files in Lightroom and ACR according to:

http://www.canonrumors.com/adobe-lightroom-cc-2015-12-adds-support-for-canon-eos-6d-mark-ii-more/

So, best stop hoping. I think any results that we see now are pretty much the real deal.

BTW, is TIFF not incable to hold all the information from a RAW file anyway? At least I observed similar limitations when working in Photoshop with TIFFs exported from Lightoom.

 

[Dan Borg]

All I'm saying is that a few of the tests (including the facebook video posted earlier) used dpp to convert to TIFF and then process in lightroom, so I just wanted to point out that I don't think that this is a valid test.

 

[Joules]

Well, that is certainly a good point. I just don't want to get my hopes up again after having accepted that Canon did it's usual thing here and pushed things just as far as they need to be for average use. Which is fine, but takes away from the exitement of the camera in my opinion. I don't see Canon allowing so many RAWs and 6DII floating around if the production units were any different.

 

[ahsanford]

Well, that is certainly a good point. I just don't want to get my hopes up again after having accepted that Canon did it's usual thing here and pushed things just as far as they need to be for average use. Which is fine, but takes away from the exitement of the camera in my opinion. I don't see Canon allowing so many RAWs and 6DII floating around if the production units were any different.

I think you may have missed this one page back:

Bill Claff, care to comment? I can't help but notice the (e) for estimated has disappeared from your site, but it says it hasn't been updated in 8 days.

Is this your actual test data from a production camera? If final/official -- this would be a nail in the coffin on no on-chip ADC in the 6D2, would it not?

- A

Yes, up-to-date from a production unit. (Failed to update the date when new data was posted. )

So, my needle is rapidly moving from 'we don't know where this FM forum RAW file came from' to 'yeah, this is probably what it looks like' -- the 6D2 appears to have been left out of the on-chip ADC party.

Or, flipping it around, the 80D got magically hooked up with the new tech and Canon decided to put a stop to that in mid-level body offerings for cost or positioning reasons.

- A

 

[Joules]

I think you may have missed this one page back: [...]

No, I've seen that. In fact, I've read every post on this thread ... The 6DII was the camera I was looking forward to forever as my first DSLR upgrade, so all this is fairly interesting to me. But I've burried my hopes of seeing any improvements there back when he first said that his images came from DPR, which is a few pages ago. That's why I said I don't want to get my hopes up for any improvements. Seems to me the case is pretty much settled. It doesn't really affect my shooting style, so it isn't terrible. But it's certainly not great either.