Small bomb from LL and DxO

OT:
Many thanks to you, lpowell, for the amazing ptools settings:
I have currently patched my PAL GF1 with your combined Fast Action 3 GOP patch
and life is beautiful here... :)
 
LL has a lot of old reviews and biased/misguided information based on opinion. ISO is really irrelevant anyways; its gain. the T stop/F stop explanation is better than most however.

I believe in Manual mode, ALL the DSLR's ive had have auto ISO. D3s, D300, D50, T2i; i dont see how/why this is an issue; having the ISO jump around in auto is just as bad as the hard stops when the camera tries to change aperture in auto modes. ISO/gain, shutter speed, and aperture could ALL be made stepless by the camera manufacturers; its the 'old school' film roots that are keeping things held back. if im not mistaken i believe it was the D300 launch firmware that had a bug where you had to reset ISO to manual in Live View mode every time (fixed now) as that drove me up the wall, so i never used Live View, and still do not if i can avoid it. if aperture, gain, and shutter speed could be steplessly (shutter speed obviously not truly stepless but at least smaller increments, say 1/100 second increments) then we would have a tool FAR more useful than the half-baked HDSLR's of today. i HATE auto ISO, and i am not a fan of any ISO over 400. thats what lighting or longer exposures is for.

also i find 90% of the menu and camera 'features' i never use (in camera retouch and picture styles? seriously on a D300? 15 scene modes between manual stills and video mode on the T2i?) and are garbage that is best done on a proper editing program. also 'P/program' mode on HDSLR's can go too; ive yet to use it. mostly i use aperture priority, shutter priority, or full manual.
 
Zissou said:
if aperture, gain, and shutter speed could be steplessly (shutter speed obviously not truly stepless but at least smaller increments, say 1/100 second increments) then we would have a tool FAR more useful than the half-baked HDSLR's of today. i HATE auto ISO, and i am not a fan of any ISO over 400. thats what lighting or longer exposures is for.
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This would also solve the luminance flicker you get doing time lapses in varying light levels such as around dusk/dawn unless you actually lock down aperture and shutter....in which case you cant actually film the complete transition from day to night anyway.

Zissou said:
also i find 90% of the menu and camera 'features' i never use (in camera retouch and picture styles? seriously on a D300? 15 scene modes between manual stills and video mode on the T2i?) and are garbage that is best done on a proper editing program. also 'P/program' mode on HDSLR's can go too; ive yet to use it. mostly i use aperture priority, shutter priority, or full manual.
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+1

Give me a digital FM2 with RAW video and I would be happy ;-)
 
henryciullo said:
.very interesting.. it confirms a suspect i had on the stock 14-140 lens, that it is actually slower than stated.. when i did a couple of tests to compare stock lens with various FD lenses i have, i found that i always had to open up iris more on stock lens at same focal length and same lighting and shutter compared to other lenses..
try filming something with a FD 50mm lens @ say 5.6 .. adjust your shutter to get correct exposure. Shoot the same scene with stock lens @50mm focal and same shutter and you'll see that 5.6 is not enough...
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The LL article raises three questions: how much light does a given lens absorb/reflect? how much light does the camera sensor absorb at different f stops? and does the manufacturer automatically increase the sensor gain to compensate for the light that the camera sensor looses at lower f-stops? Your experiment reflects on the first question, but the LL article is primarily addressing the second and third questions. And it's only the last question that relates to manufacturer cheating.
 
dasbin said:
Along the same lines of thinking as lpowell's post, I just wanted to contest something the author of the article wrote,

"1. When I select a specific ISO, I have a reason to do so. I find it unacceptable for the camera to change it without my knowledge."

In digital cameras, this will happen regardless of the transmission issue. Usually due to white balance. Camera will apply a massive, VARIABLE amount of channel gain - which is really the exact same mechanism as ISO gain - as soon as you apply a white balance that is not UniWB. You will never have full control of your gain unless you expect to shoot in UniWB all the time.
Honestly, ISO settings mean almost nothing at all. To the author: you're deluded if you think that on any digital camera you have the opportunity to directly affect ISO in a linear way.
Not to mention all the dishonesty in camera's published ISO values.
Then again, I've been reading that ISO is not necessarily objectivelly quantifiable anyway, it's just an arbitrary unit based on rules-of-thumb more than anything else, so perhaps we shouldn't fault them for not using the same measurement techniques that DxO does.

What I would really like to see is seperate R,G,B gain meters. Even if you keep the controls the same and keep ISO around, at least show us a numeric value of what the camera is doing. Better, add a mode that also allows us to control individual channel gain at both an analog and digital level.

I'd also like to see a reduction of the green pixel sites used, and more red and blues. The original explanation of it matching the human eye's sensitivity to green doesn't make sense when you consider that the camera ends up adding massive gain to red and blue to compensate anyway.
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Very interesting, and very informative. I notice that when I apply a custom WB to interior shots with very yellow lighting, the whites end up looking very noisy , like too much gain had been applied. And now I understand why :)
 
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