WTF: another cheap plastic zoom?

A short bit of Nikon bashing now.

Is the new 18-105 VR kit lens really what the Nikon camera system needed at this juncture? How many do we have now? Just for the DX system we have all these normal zooms in the lineup: 18-55 II, 18-55 VR, 16-85 VR, 18-70, 18-105 VR, 18-135, 18-200 VR, 17-55.

That's eight lenses, at least half of which are completely redundant, and maybe two of which are actually good. Couldn’t they just use the new 16-85 VR for the D90 kit, and call it a day in the cheap crap department? That is probably a much better lens anyway and it's actually delivering more value to the line up instead of bloating it up.

And how many DX primes do we have by now? Not a one (**). Now I don't think we'll ever see one, DX being a second-class system and all that, but for Pete's sake the prime lineup needs some love right now!

(**) We've got the 10.5mm DX fisheye, but I wouldn't call that a general-purpose lens.

Nikon bashing done. Whew, that needed to get out.

The D90 changes the game

I’m sorry to have to break the news for Canon fanboys… but in terms of mindshare the 50D is pretty much done, stick a fork in this one.

It's not that it's not a fine camera, but that it's just - you know - it's old school now. The game has changed and Canon has the honor of having launched one of the best products of the old era right on the eve of the new era. I do mean eve as meaning the day before. That's such poor strategy, I wonder if they thought that was going to steal Nikon's thunder.

I'm not interested in the "video's not the point" mass-scale denial going on right now because I think the marketplace will vote with their dollars and that they will see it very much as the point. I can't imagine a buyer from the "mom and pop" crowd walking into a camera store, looking to spend $1K and some change on a good family camera, and choosing the 50D over the D90 because it has "more cross-type phase-detection points". LOL.

Where to go to learn about the D90? Firstly there's the video on Chase Jarvis's blog. He also had this very quotable opinion blurb that sums it up nicely:

After using this camera and pushing it to it’s limits, I can honestly say that it’s a camera that will deliver stunning, emotive pictures--and MOVIES for Pete’s sake! MOVIES!--to an entire spectrum of amateur photographers. And that’s exciting.

That video is also available linked from the D90 microsite which has lots of other marketing prose, and then there's the Dpreview preview of course.

Finally there's the brochure PDF from the Nikon Imaging website. Remember what I said about the 50D's weakness earlier this week (that it wasn't innovative enough)? Check out the first page of the PDF. You can't make this shit up.

Yeah, Nikon had that thought too.

It's been such a terrible year for Canon: AF problems at the high end, uninspiring products in their bread & butter range, nothing new or innovative in sight... They need a world-shaking 5D Mk-II so badly right now.

The 50D... yawn?

The one-liner: the 50D looks like a fine camera.

The long version:

1. If Canon is planning a major coup with the 5D Mk-II, then they’re certainly not tipping their cards with the 50D. The 50D is a safe play, straight from the book, and that’s just Canon’s preferred way to play the game.

2. The 50D’s claim to fame is to have the potential to produce the most detailed images from an APS-C camera yet, and of course to undercut the D300 in price. The move to gapless micro-lenses should give it D300-level sensitivity with 25% more resolution at the end of the day. I have no doubt that Canon did a fabulous job with the sensor as they always do.

3. I conclude the 50D is the king of the most visible and most vocal market segment today, but for how long? The 50D’s weakness is that it’s not very innovative. It’ll be easy to displace it with something innovative.

4. Compared to the D300, the 50D is cheaper. Plainly. The value statement is about equal because the D300 is more camera for more money, given that you are willing to accept there are qualities in cameras that are not just image quality (it's the most important item but not the only item).

If the rumors about the D90 are true (i.e. that it shoots HD video through live-view) then I think the 50D is in trouble. Otherwise, I think it's on solid ground. We'll see very soon.

Tripod testing results

A good friend was kind enough to lend me a Gitzo 1327 for testing (and my education). It was an eye-opening experiment to say the least. I had to tell my friend that he cost me money by lending me this wonderful toy.

Test Subjects

• Bogen 3001N + Bogen 3025 head
• Gitzo 1327 + Bogen Compact Ball/Plate

Note: I put my current head on John’s legs and my old head on my current legs.

Experimental Parameters

Camera:	Nikon D80
Lens:	Nikkor 70-200mm f/2.8 AF-S VR ED-IF
Focal length:	200mm (300mm effective)
Speed:	1/4 second
Aperture:	f/8
ISO:	100
Distance:	~13 feet

Note: The D80 is a mid-range camera and doesn’t have a mirror lock-up mode. It does have an “exposure delay” mode that waits ~¼ second between flipping the mirror and opening the shutter. I varied this parameter.

Note: The 70-200 has VR and I chose to also vary this parameter. At first I assumed VR would be the enemy so I disabled it for most shots. Towards the end of the experiment I switched it on – with surprising results.

Reference Image

This image was taken at 1/250 second under flash power. The result is free of motion blur, and is about as sharp as the 70-200 gets @ 200mm (its weakest length). There’s just a touch of softness compared to D80’s maximum available resolution, with is only achievable @70mm on this lens or with more exotic glass.

Note: No images have been sharpened in this test, including this one.

Note: All images are 100% crops from an area covering roughly 1% of the total frame.

Bogen-vs-Gitzo: w/ exposure delay & w/o VR

This is the obvious first test, which I will dub the “prosumer” test. The D80’s exposure delay mode is a poor-man’s mirror-up, and is indicated for this kind of shooting. As per popular wisdom, VR is turned off.

Both tripods produced results that are softer than the reference shot, but would hold well to scrutiny by most ordinary viewers. There’s a very minor edge to the Gitzo here, but you have to look pretty hard to see it.

LEFT: Gitzo. RIGHT: Bogen.

Bogen-vs-Gitzo: w/o exposure delay & w/o VR

This is the “prosumer in a hurry” test, in that we all know we should disable VR/IS on a tripod but we may not always take the time to set our cameras for an exposure delay / mirror up. This is how I my use my own tripod most of the time, and I expect most of you too.

Armageddon is the result.

The Gitzo produced very soft results here, perhaps usable but just barely. The Bogen however produced useless garbage.

LEFT: Gitzo. RIGHT: Bogen.

Bogen-vs-Gitzo: w/o exposure delay & w/ VR

This is the “consumer” test. You just put the camera on automatic, plunk it down on the tripod. Leave VR on. Don’t change settings.

Both tripods improved over the previous test.

The Gitzo produces usable results now under these conditions, somewhere in-between the previous two tests. The Bogen also improved but still isn’t as good as the Gitzo was w/o VR, I wouldn’t use this result.

LEFT: Gitzo. RIGHT: Bogen.

Conclusion

I have a few take-home messages:

Mirror-up / exposure-delay is essential for tripod use in the “danger zone” of 1-second to 1/30-second exposure times.

The D80’s exposure-delay mode may not be as good as a true mirror-up (speculation) but it’s certainly no joke. It delivers real value.

The Gitzo carbon tripod is substantially better than the Bogen aluminum tripod to dampen vibration.

If you don’t have a mirror-up / delay mode, keep VR / IS on when using a tripod.

This is probably all true for long lenses, 200mm effective and above. Not sure if it's such a good idea to keep VR on for shorter focal lengths. I will make another experiment later with a normal or wide length.

It's capital to note before leave that besides improved effectiveness the Gitzo product's construction is head-and-shoulder above the Bogen product. The higher price is pretty clearly justified. Sigh.

Comments on the Dpreview review of Sigma Fifty

It's been about two months since we first heard about Sigma's 50mm f/1.4 lens. I wrote a piece following the announcement here, and compared MTF further here.

Now that Dpreview and Photozone have both had a chance to take a look, here’s a mix of results from “Sigma Fifty” and its Canon/Nikon competition. These are the FX results from Dpreview. I’ll briefly mention DX (incl. Photozone's) results below.

Sigma, Canon and Nikon at f/1.4.

Wide open the Sigma Fifty pretty clearly dominates. This is what it was designed to do and why it’s such a big bucket of a lens. The poor performance in the corners is almost certainly due to a 2-stop (!!) light fall-off (colloquial vignette). Don’t be too bullish about the Canon or Nikon either, they have 2.7 stops of fall-offs.

The Nikon lags throughout the test but here at f/1.4 the gap is just staggering, especially when you consider that the Sigma/Canon are paired to a 21MP 1Ds-III and the Nikon is on a 12MP D3.

Sigma, Canon and Nikon at f/2.

Both the Canon and Nikon improve tremendously around f/1.8 but the Sigma continues to rule the pack through f/2~f/2.8. The Sigma’s center resolution here is just enough to quench the DX format over most of that frame. Light fall-off is now ~1 stop for the Sigma and ~1.5 stops for the Canon/Nikon.

Sigma, Canon and Nikon at f/5.6.

Stopped down all three are solid performers, but the Sigma is at its limits on the 1Ds Mk-III. Somewhere around f/4 the Canon comes out way ahead. It looks like the Canon 50mm f/1.4 has resolution to spare up to ~30MP beyond this aperture. The Nikon has just a bit more resolution still in it, but recall that it’s sitting on a 12MP sensor only here (but colors are normalized so it’s still apples-to-apples there). Light fall-off is nothing to worry about from f/4 onwards for any of them.

What’s the DX performance like?

It’s a mixed bag. Used stopped-down the Sigma Fifty is just good enough to quench DX sensors, and at any aperture has even behavior across the whole frame without any light fall-off. Wide-open it’s not quite as sharp as the Sigma-30 however.

Comparing the results of the Sigma .vs. the Zeiss in the Photozone tests (note: crossing shooting platforms hurts comparison) I believe they are roughly equivalent for most purposes. I would select the Sigma for center-axis sharpness at f/1.4 but probably pick the Zeiss for anything else.

A word about the Bokeh

Back a few months when this lens was announced I was a bit worried about the bokeh, because it's typically not Sigma's strong suit. You’ll want to check out this small collection of images then: http://www.motleypixel.com/reviews/index.htm Certainly that’s not bad. Based on these and other images (on Flickr) I conclude that the bokeh is marginal at f/1.4 but improves suddenly at f/2. From f/2 onwards the bokeh is soft and “relaxed”, I can’t find anything bad to say about it.

Short blurb on the Zeiss Powerpack

Think of a big lens. A big shiny lens. Then crank up the shine to eleven.

When you've got a lens like this you don't just give it a number, you call it the Powerpack. Does your camera pack this much power? The filter ring accepts regular (!) 111mm filters for your convenience.

The mount is old-school 6x6 Hasselblad folks, none of that wimpy 35mm stuff. It's that big.

I doubt I'll ever come across one of these. I stumbled on the documentation looking for evidence that Carl Zeiss might re-release a 4/300 lens design for ZF.

I did find a review of this monster on Shutterbug's website. Check it out, the writing is hilarious. Some note-worthy quotes:

“What the hell is that?” asked a local photojournalist. “Why, this is my Zeiss 300mm f/2.8 APO with 1.7x APO-Mutar extender on a 203FE body with PM 90 prism,” I casually remarked. Impressed, he shrugged and walked away. Needless to say, when I staked out a position the print journalists cleared a space for the guy with the prettiest lens. [Shutterbug]

At $21290 I'm going to have to pass on this one I'm afraid.

Now if Carl Zeiss were to launch that 4/300 T* I was looking for...

About the photography of cats

I’ve been tracking the results of this query every hour or so since Friday. There are some really impressive early-product-life pictures, a significant fraction of these people have skill and vision.

The kids in a sandbox look great, the night shots glorious, there’s a couple of weddings already (at least one of which is clearly professional-level). There’s a boat load of portraiture, some guy likes the girl + railroad-tracks combo a lot. And whatever this is, it's great! There are also some naked body-painted 20-something girls with airbrushed Nikon labels on their bellies, but the photography of these sucks. These subjects are left carrying the pictures by themselves... ;^)

I do wish people had better self-editing skills though. The Japanese dudes who shot their mugs in front of the IBM logo for 10-pages’ worth… and that guy who posted 20 pages of softball (some actually good)… these can drown out the visually interesting imagery a little bit.

What’s truly amazing though is that the Cat Fraction™ is somewhere around 5% only! That's only 5% of D700 images shot so far have been featuring cats, or dogs as proxies for cats. What’s even more amazing (what could top that?) is that there are some cat pictures that rock! This is seriously a first for me – the “Spot on the couch”-type stuff makes me gag. Yeah, even though that linked one is a nice sample of the genre.

But then there’s this guy:

Photo Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/dumbkid/2721984448/

Ok it’s not fine art, but it’s a great photograph. Kind-of reminds you that cats are just waiting to eat your babies, don’t forget to feed this one.

Now going forward I wish this other query would return more results…

Poorly chosen image samples

The Nikon Imaging site has some really interesting choices to pitch their high end optics.

For instance, consider this strong pass made at the market of squirrel photographers:

Is that really the most compelling image they could take with this lens? Seriously.

Here I thought 400/2.8s were used mainly to stay away from bear-type creatures, such as bears (e.g. black, gray, grizzly, polar) and football players (various colors). Maybe this is in fact the ferocious Ursus Rodentus, rumored to decimate entire villages starting with their nuts...

There’s also the 300mm f/2.8 VR that’s pitched with a random picture of a girl in front of nothing. Just about any 85+ mm lens north of $400 could have taken that one. It’s infinitely less cool than the one they have for the older non-VR f/4 version.

See:

Spend $5000. 300mm f/2.8 VR.

And:

Spend $1000. 300mm f/4.

Not a very compelling showcase for the amazing 2.8/VR lens. They should hook up with the guys at http://www.motleypixel.com/reviews/index.htm for samples (here 200mm f/2 VR)…

Yum!