the last word

Continuing my exploration of the effects on color accuracy and image noise in various cameras, I ran my simulation on a group of cameras with lighting from D22 through D90. Here’s what I got for color accuracy, using sensitivity metamerism index (SMI) as the metric: With the exception of the Sigma DP1 Merrill, which is… [Read More]

A long-time reader commented on the previous post: One aspect of low light performance is low noise under warm lighting. At sub-2700K, many older cameras end up with tremendously large WB multipliers for the blue channel, when compared to “modern” CFAs. I decided to take a look at that. I’ll show you what I found,… [Read More]

I’ll now show you some charts that summarize the material presented in the last two posts, and after that I’ll give you my takeaways. Here’s the SMI for all of the cameras simulated: There are two clear winners here, the XYZ response, and the optimized set of Gaussians. There are five losers: The Leica M8,… [Read More]

In the preceding post, I looked at the relationship between the spectra of several cameras color filter array mediated spectral response and the noise after the camera raw files are converted to colorimetric ones.  In this post, we’ll look at some abstract responses. The first is 2-degree CIE 1931 XYZ: Top notch SMI, decent noise…. [Read More]