the last word

Someone expressed interest is seeing how the Sony tone compression/expansion simulation would work with our test image if the delta modulation component were removed, leaving us with only the 13-to-11-bit tone compression and its 11-to-13-bit counterpart. I’m glad to oblige. Here’s the target image in Adobe RGB: Here’s what it looks like in Adobe RGB… [Read More]

I added ideal photon noise to the test of the previous post, assuming that the camera’s ISO dial is set to 100. Here’s the simulated uncompressed raw file demosaiced by bilinear interpolation: And here’s the file companded by the Sony compression algorithm and demosaiced in same way, subtracted in a linear color space with Adobe… [Read More]

[Added March 17, 2014] A reader posted a comment that you can see stating that there must be a systematic flaw in my simulation. He was right. Details are in the comments attached to this post. I fixed the error, and the results are reported at the bottom of this page. [Now, on with the… [Read More]

There’s a lot of Internet talk about whether the compression algorithm that Sony uses in the a7, the a7R, and several other cameras cause visible damage to the images. The furor seems to be gaining intensity rather than dying down. Because of that, I’ve decided to do something that I’ve resisted in the past, which… [Read More]