On 28 April 2010 08:32, Mark Roberts <m...@robertstech.com> wrote:
>
> I find this recently fashionable bashing of the Samsung sensor funny.
> It was quite a breakthrough when it appeared and probably the best in
> its class at the time of introduction. It's still a great sensor now,
> IMO - I prefer it over the sensor in the K-X at ISO settings below
> 800, which is all I ever use. If Samsung expanded the same sensor to
> full-frame size I'd happily buy a camera that employed it.
I should probably qualify my comments about Samsung, especially
considering my current favourite camera is a Samsung :-)
I spend a lot of time at high ISO, and while the K20D was an
improvement over my K10D in that respect, the K-7 wasn't. Some people
claim it is, but from all the K20D vs K-7 comparisons I've seen, my
deduction is that the K-7 might have a bit better detail, but worse
chroma noise, at high ISO. The K-x, on the other hand, is a big
improvement over the K20D/K-7 at, and I insist again, high ISOs. The
reason I didn't buy a K-7 was because of the K-x's performance at high
ISO, despite the K-7 having many, many features I wanted (and being
smaller than my K10D, which is a plus).
I'm not saying the Samsung sensor is bad, I'm saying it doesn't
deliver what *I* need, which is new-generation high-ISO performance.
If I never needed to shoot above ISO 800, I would've bought the K-7 in
a heartbeat.
The Samsung NX10 I'm currently loving uses a 14MP sensor that might or
might not be the same as that in the K-7; I'd like to take some
comparison shots with both, but I don't have a K-7 nor know anyone who
does. What I'm seeing from this sensor is superb resolution at low
ISOs that degrades rapidly above 800. At ISO 3200 (its max), chroma
noise is very, very low, but unlike Canikon, detail is not smeared
out, and yet the images look...brittle, for lack of a better word. It
seems as if random noise is being added to give it the appearance of
film grain. I still haven't figured out how to deal with it in
postprocessing as it's different to how my K10D handles high ISO, but
I think I can get it to work well in B&W (which is what I want).
This behaviour is different to what I've seen from the K20D and K-7,
so Samsung is doing its own thing, which I applaud them for. I fully
expect them to make a better sensor when they release version 3 of
this 14MP CMOS, but I wouldn't bet on it being better (at high ISO!)
than what Sony has right now, or will release at that time. Hopefully,
Samsung will surprise us; for my part, I'm cheering them on.
Cheers,
--M.
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