RED Sensors getting bigger

[Tom Lowe]

I certainly agree with that. What I am wondering is 1. How badly do DSLRs smoke the RED in low light shooting? and 2. Above what ASA setting is the image from one of those DSLRs unacceptable due to noise?

 

1. Badly. 2. With new DSLRs, up 1600 should be fine. I've seen ISO 3200 shots that look good. Keep in mind that with 21mp, you can massively downsample them to 1080p or 2K, which means lots of the noise goes bye-bye.

[Neil Duffy]

1. Badly. 2. With new DSLRs, up 1600 should be fine. I've seen ISO 3200 shots that look good. Keep in mind that with 21mp, you can massively downsample them to 1080p or 2K, which means lots of the noise goes bye-bye.

 

 

The color of the night time videos I have seen from the Canon are incredible. The issue is movement, like shooting while driving. I put up some links to these videos on the Dec. 3 thread.

 

Will Nikon and Canon start modifying their lenses to handle motion? Like breathing and making FF possible. I am not a cinematographer, but is it possible to address David's issues with FF on the larger lenses. In other words, are the issues of FF with larger lenses inherent in larger lens design, or just part of the current implementation of larger lenses.

 

Thanks.

[Brian Drysdale]

1. Badly. 2. With new DSLRs, up 1600 should be fine. I've seen ISO 3200 shots that look good. Keep in mind that with 21mp, you can massively downsample them to 1080p or 2K, which means lots of the noise goes bye-bye.

 

Certainly for documentary work you want to be able shoot at 800 to 1600 ASA without too noticeable noise, which is basically what the old SD 2/3" cameras could do.

 

In the in end the camera has to be a good balance of features, going for one feature because it improves a certain aspect of the performance can throw up other issues which mean it's not so practical for other uses.

 

I believe the new RED sensor is supposed to be rated at 800 ASA anyway, so if it manages 2000 ASA without being noisy that should cover the needs of most productions. Usually if you want more gain, you can live with some noise because of the nature of subject matter.

[Stephen Williams]

Certainly for documentary work you want to be able shoot at 800 to 1600 ASA without too noticeable noise, which is basically what the old SD 2/3" cameras could do.

 

Hi Brian,

 

With tungsten lights as well, looks like some way to go berfoe their is an revoloution.

 

Stephen

[Sam Wells]

I certainly agree with that. What I am wondering is 1. How badly do DSLRs smoke the RED in low light shooting? and 2. Above what ASA setting is the image from one of those DSLRs unacceptable due to noise?

 

There's not a fast answer to number 2. What do you accept ? Like film grain, noise betrays itself in large even areas (say in this case a twilight sky......)

 

I'd say for me & the Nikon D3 ASA 200-800 is the optimal range, but I've done some good night stuff @ 2500. Black & White I can do 3200 - it looks like a fast film stock at worst, T Max 400 (but 3 stops faster !) at best. (Chroma noise is always the most problematic).

 

Then again, it's "default ISO" - 200 - is the sweetest; however I can sometimes shoot at 800 with no pain, even 'pushing' a RAW (NEF) file in post from 200 in some cases (with a good converter e.g. Capture NX this can work as well as on board gain boost - which indicates raw converter and post work is of significant importance here).

 

Which, promising as they are makes the 5D Mk II (or D90 to a lesser extent) both very interesting but problematic for major league play, or to put it another way it seems the Canon will make great 'slides' but we need to get great 'negatives'.

 

-Sam

[John Sprung]

Hi John, you have refreshed some good memories now forgotten. I liked the published code in the IBM technical reference manual as it helped me in understanding what the computer was doing, especially during boot up. If I remember correctly there was no support for a "graphics" card/device in those models. Then there was this company "Hercules", that came up with one of the first graphics adapter, perhaps called Monochrome Display Adapter?? (MDA??) at that time, but the PC had no support for it. So Hercules would fool PC Into thinking that it was still in "text" mode.

Yes, those were the days....

 

MDA was IBM's basic monitor card. Later you could get their CGA color card. Both had text modes in which they displayed the contents of some RAM that was on the card and located in the machine's address space at B000:0000 for CGA and C000:0000 for MDA. You could get text on the screen much faster simply by writing directly to the card's RAM, though you did have to interleave attribute bytes. The Hercules emulated all that, plus some extra tricks of its own, though I never needed to write for it.

 

The RAM on the cards was a little bigger than the screen, something like 96 bytes IIRC, so you could stash some flags or whatnot up there so as not to have to change the DS or ES registers. Forgetting about segment registers was always a major source of bugs.

 

 

 

 

-- J.S.