Sigma SD14: Quick Look at a Quirky Wonder
by Wesley Fink on June 3, 2008 4:20 AM EST- Posted in
- Digital Camera
Final Thoughts
The Sigma SD14 is a huge refinement of everything that came before it. It is solidly built, well balanced, and easy to handle, with features that are much more contemporary and competitive than the SD10. These include a good viewfinder based on a real pentaprism with 98% accuracy in the view. The viewfinder is definitely one of the most significant improvements in the SD14.
The 5-point AF system is not state-of-the-art, but compared to the SD10 it is light years better. The AF module is new, so perhaps we can understand that it has trouble finding the right AF point, but it will certainly get better in the future. As a whole, the AF is much faster than the SD10 AF and much more flexible.
The electronics are something of a question mark. We initially had issues with very long start-up times with the SD14, but that turned out to be a CF card compatibility issue. With the change in CF cards start up was very fast - a second or less. However, the SD14, like its predecessors, is still plagued by agonizingly slow image processing. 2 to 3 seconds to image display followed by 6+ seconds to write a RAW image can only be described as slow. The JPEG support is also a nice option, but I think Sigma has achieved a first in that JPEG processing is actually slower than RAW. That is still a mystery.
Once the CF problem was sorted out the reliability of the SD14 was excellent in our continued testing. We are still sorting out the random lock-ups we first experienced with the SD14, but it now appears they were mostly related to a CF card design the SD14 definitely did not like. We have not experienced a single lockup since the CF card change. That certainly makes the SD14 an easier camera to live with than we first reported, but no matter how we recast these results there is no ignoring the slow image processing and write times of the Sigma SD14. We can only wonder what a Canon or Nikon or Olympus could do with the Foveon sensor, and whether the issue is the Foveon sensor overhead requirements or Sigma's issues with building processing boards. Until others release a Foveon camera, we can't answer that question.
With the limited image processing options and the extremely slow image processing of the Sigma SD14 you might conclude that there is no reason whatsoever for anyone to buy this camera. You would be wrong. When used properly, there is an almost three-dimensional appearance to Foveon images that nothing else can duplicate. It is very close to slide film with the kind of fluidity and color depth that is hard to describe but easy to love.
Sigma makes a big
deal of the SD14 being easy to operate, and we would agree that it is very easy to operate. However, that does not mean that the SD14
is easy to use. To use this camera properly requires more work than competing cameras - and a lot of
knowledge about photography. You have to be willing to shoot RAW most of the time
and spend the time in Sigma Photo Pro and Photoshop to get the most from your images.
Frankly, Sigma Photo Pro does a great job on Auto and you can safely batch process
images and save as TIFFs for Photoshop manipulation. For most images this is all the post-processing you may need, which can speed up the process for everyday shooting.
Photoshop CS3 is also reasonably good in the latest Camera RAW support in converting Sigma RAW. It's not quite as good, or as quite as flexible, as Photo Shop Pro, but it is not the disaster that past Photoshop RAW conversion was with Foveon images.
Our title said it all in this case. The Sigma SD14 is a quirky camera that is very slow in processing any images that it captures. Despite that, it is a significant upgrade and refinement to the earlier SD10 and SD9. It is certainly usable in the SD14 version as long as you keep its limitations in mind. If you choose the SD14 you learn to live with its quirks - for the gorgeous quality of the Foveon images. You have to be dedicated to live with an SD14 as there are much easier ways to achieve great results with competitive cameras. However, nothing from any competitor is quite as incredible as the best Foveon images, so there are definitely reasons to try to work with this camera.
The SD14 is probably best in the studio, in macro work, and possibly in weddings where the image quality might make your work stand out. It is even suitable for candids where speed and burst capability are not important. It would, however, be a terrible "candids" camera for sports or family action events or anywhere where slow image display times or slow image processing would be serious handicaps. In the right hands, the SD14 can be a remarkable photographic tool, but in the wrong hands it will just be a source of annoyance.
One thing definitely deserves mention in this review, however, and that is Sigma's extensive line of lenses for their SD series cameras. There are 39 Sigma lenses in their current catalog that are listed as available in the Sigma mount. Sigma-mount lenses are not easy to find, but the better ones we have worked with are very nice indeed. The 18-200mm f3.5-6.5 OS displayed very nice quality and a very competent OS implementation. We shot a number of images at 3 to 4 stops lower than the 1 over focal length rule that were very usable. It was also an absolute joy to mount a 15+ year old Sigma Macro on the SD14 and see it work exactly as it should. It was noisy compared to the best motor lenses form Sigma today, but the AF and exposure was exactly where it needed to be.
Last, after some experimentation and research it was clear the Foveon is better at highlights than at shadow detail. It seems to handle overexposure much better than underexposure. In the end, the best shots came by overexposing about 2/3 of a stop and letting Auto take care of it in RAW processing, or doing a little further exposure compensation on top of auto. This generally gave decent highlights without losing so much in shadow detail.
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chibimike - Tuesday, June 3, 2008 - link
Layer-per-primary is not the future.It is a great idea, but passing through the first two layers to get to the red layer eats too much of the light. To make up for it, they make the red layer supersensitive, which then leads to clipping or extremely complex attempts at color correction. Unless there is some breakthrough material to make the sensor out of, it will always be noisy.
aeternitas - Tuesday, June 3, 2008 - link
I see your point, and its a good one.Except useing this method of three layer technology and pretending thats the only way is pretty close minded and short sighted.
Their are better methods than what Foveon has, but layer-per-primary as a base WILL be the future of digital photography. Its a technology in its infancy, and hinestly, do you see any other method that would even come close to haveing the same future potential? If you mention fuji ill shoot you.
Justin Case - Wednesday, June 4, 2008 - link
Potential is irrelevant when the current technology has aready hit the "lens wall".Bayer pattern sensors are already at the limit of lens resolution, and can still be pushed forward. Unless Foveon can suddenly increase the resolution of their sensors by 300%, fix all the color problems, and Sigma releases lenses that can beat the top Nikon and Canon models, they simply don't offer any advantage (note that there are sharper lenses than Canon's or Nikon's - Leica, Hasselblad, Voigtlander, Zeiss - but they're used by less than 0.1% of people).
If anyone is interested in improving the quality of Bayer sensors, the way to go is tetrachromacy (Sony is experimenting with that), but that makes processing more complex and offers only a very slight little advantage, so I don't see that happening, either.
Current Bayer sensors have hit the resolution limit for lenses, and improvements to sensitivity and chroma range are more important than resolution. Since those are precisely the points where Foveon is further behind, its future isn't particularly bright. Some people will continue to buy them, because the concept "seems to make sense", but in the real world they're simply worse in every sense. Even if done "perfectly" (with materials that don't even exist yet), they'd be more expensive and the advantage wouldn't be noticeable without a major upgrade to lens quality.
chibimike - Wednesday, June 4, 2008 - link
No not fuji, great for pocket cams, not so hot for SLRs.I think one of two things. Either a new material with much lower noise properties. Or if costs keep going down, we could potentially see someone do a creative take on the three sensor design like they do in high end video cameras.
aeternitas - Tuesday, June 3, 2008 - link
PS.There is this new and great technology called PNG. No one expects you to display tiff or raw files. I'm not sure why a paragraph was put into explaining that to everyone.
Wesley Fink - Tuesday, June 3, 2008 - link
We use PNG all the time in our articles and reviews and it is a desirable lossless format like TIFF. However it is not really very suitable for photographic images. To quote from Wikipedia:"JPEG can produce a smaller file than PNG for photographic (and photo-like) images, since JPEG uses a lossy encoding method specifically designed for photographic image data. Using PNG instead of a high-quality JPEG for such images would result in a large increase in filesize (often 5–10 times) with negligible gain in quality."
For photographs PNG is no better than JPEG, but the files are MUCH larger. PNG is best with tables and line drawings. We need a new web format as neither TIFF or PNG are suitable and current JPEG is just 8-bit - perhaps an update of JPEG.
Justin Case - Wednesday, June 4, 2008 - link
PNG uses prediction and error coding, followed by entropy encoding. It's pretty much the best lossless algorithm you can get for photos.For line drawings and tables, GIF (LZ compression) will frequently produce smaller files than PNG, especially if they have regular dithering patterns.
If you think there's no difference between JPEG (even at the maximum quality allowed by Photoshop) and PNG, you need to have your eyes checked. Even though Wikipedia is hardly an authoritative source, the article you quoted says "a negligible gain in quality". Not "no gain". You're the one who extrapolated that to "PNG is no better than JPEG".
The meaning of "negligible" depends on the situation. Yes, the PNG files are significantly bigger. And yes, if you use a crappy camera, you'll get artifacts from the lens and sensor anyway. But when you're comparing high-end cameras and sensors, it definitely pays to use a lossless format (generated from raw, of course, not from an in-camera JPEG). Even better, post a couple of raw files and let people who are interested download and compare them using appropriate software.
BTW, there already is an "update of JPEG". It's called JPEG-2000 and gets about 40% higher compression for the same (lossy) image quality, and even supports lossless compression. If you can convince browser makers (namely Microsoft) to add support for it to their software, we'd be thankful. Until then, I doubt it'll catch on.
I have no idea why you need a higher-than-8-bit format "for the web", considering that about half the LCDs out there are actually 6-bit panels and that 99.9% of graphics cards are limited to 8-bpc. We definitely don't need browsers to become more bloated just so they can handle HDR or RPF images natively (which 99% of people have no use for in web pages).
For distribution and webpage "decoration", 8-bit JPEGs are fine. The question is whether they're fine for an article comparing minute differences between high-end digital sensors. And the answer to that is almost certainly no (just as MP3 files aren't really the right choice to evaluate high-end audio equipment).
Deadtrees - Thursday, June 5, 2008 - link
Last time I checked, JPEG2000 is pretty much dead and MS is trying to setup a new JPEG2000 like picture file system along with many other major companies. I forgot the details but it was open architecture and it was better than JPEG 2000.Justin Case - Friday, June 6, 2008 - link
JPEG-2000 is only "dead" due to lack of native support in Windows and web browsers. It's a significant improvement on JPEG.Microsoft's format (which has gone through three names, I think the current one is "MS HD Photo") is a DRM'd format which, in terms of quality vs. compression, is slightly inferior to JPEG-2000 and can only be manipulated through Microsoft's own APIs (very much not an "open architecture"). It does have support for several useful features (like floating-point HDR) but I really don't see those being relevant for a distribution format; if you want HDR data, you probably don't want lossy compression, and vice-versa.
A unified "raw" format for all camera manufacturers, on the other hand, would be nice, but considering the different sensor layouts, different bit depths, different processing required, etc., you would have a single file extension but effectively N different sub-formats.
aeternitas - Tuesday, June 3, 2008 - link
I understand the differance between the two.In context, when mentioning all those formats, and not mentioning png, its kinda off. Also, PNG with such tiny crops is negligible.
Aside from that, a contrustive suggestion would be, if youre going to do side by side images, have a single croped image, and several mouse-overable links that change the image dynamicaly. It gives a much much better result when trying to see subtile differences between cameras.
IMO that would one-up anandtech camera reviews compaired tomost online.