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Sigma Fp review and interview / Cinema DNG RAW


Andrew Reid
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2 hours ago, Andrew Reid said:

Ah didn't realise it was parfocal as well. Not bad for £200.  I might try and fine the Zeiss but none on UK eBay at the moment, mostly seem to be in Japan.

This is where I get my old lenses from when I'm in Berlin:

https://www.shphoto.de/catalogsearch/result/?cat=0&q=anamorphot

Highly recommended

I'll see if they have any in.

Ffordes have got a few.

This one described as being "ALMOST AS NEW" for £239

https://www.ffordes.com/p/SH-18-016844/lenses-contax-slr/28-70mm-f35-45-mm

 

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20 hours ago, BTM_Pix said:

Ffordes have got a few.

This one described as being "ALMOST AS NEW" for £239

https://www.ffordes.com/p/SH-18-016844/lenses-contax-slr/28-70mm-f35-45-mm

I had to snap that up. Good find mate

Now I am waiting for my Fp to arrive. Sent the previous one back, and bought it for £1650 inc. 45mm F2.8. Yes, it may be an import. But if it breaks I can fly out, get it repaired in Japan, have a holiday, and still be £100 up vs the ridiculous UK price :)

Hopefully we will see some juicy firmware updates soon including Sigma-LOG

Or they might just call it V-LOG and nick it from Panasonic

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2 hours ago, Andrew Reid said:

I had to snap that up. Good find mate

Let me know how you get on with it.

I completely fluked the 35-70mm f3.4 for about £160 in Tokyo last year and its an absolute belter.

2 hours ago, Andrew Reid said:

Now I am waiting for my Fp to arrive. Sent the previous one back, and bought it for £1650 inc. 45mm F2.8. Yes, it may be an import. But if it breaks I can fly out, get it repaired in Japan, have a holiday, and still be £100 up vs the ridiculous UK price :)

Hopefully we will see some juicy firmware updates soon including Sigma-LOG

Or they might just call it V-LOG and nick it from Panasonic

The UK price is daft even by the usual differentials.

Currently the difference between the used and new price of them Japan is so small that I'll likely buy a new one in a kit with the 45mm f2.8.

They've got six weeks to sort out that firmware before I hand over my cash though !

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4 minutes ago, BTM_Pix said:

Let me know how you get on with it.

I completely fluked the 35-70mm f3.4 for about £160 in Tokyo last year and its an absolute belter.

Looks good.

https://phillipreeve.net/blog/carl-zeiss-vario-sonnar-t-c-y-35-70mm-f3-4-a-review/

Parfocal as well?

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34 minutes ago, Andrew Reid said:

 

Parfocal as well?

Yes but its push/pull zoom so thats a bit moot in this case!

Funnily enough, the 35-70mm is featured in that Media Division's Zeiss Super Speeds vs Contax Zeiss episode on YouTube.

I actually only got it because the shop I bought the 85mm f1.4 at for what at the time was a cheap price (under £300) and the 35-70mm was sat next to it so I thought it was worth a punt as I didn't really know too much about that particular one at the time.

Ironically, prices for the 85mm seemed to have stopped rising while the 35-70mm has carried on so it ended up being by far the shrewder deal :)

 

 

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1 hour ago, Andrew Reid said:

I've never tried one.

MapCamera have a bunch of them for around £400 so you can pick one up when you take your FP to be fixed !

Main criticism I've read about, aside from not being constant aperture, seems to be size and weight.

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14 hours ago, Lars Steenhoff said:

 

Seems the 4k of the fp is not perfect, but I knew that, still its nice to see some test.

Solid review . I`d say "not perfect" is an understatement for such  image artifacts. I shot forest a lot and  have noticed some strange flicker  on the trees in some shots, but I didn`t think it is so bad. Now  it  looks more  like  a   serious manufacturing defect. I wonder, does  anybody  from Sigma know about this? Is there any communication channel for bug reports?If it is unrepairable through the firmware, then this is  the end)

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I've had a bunch of contax in the past. I think we all go through phases!

I had that 28-70 Contax and it's a nice lens. I don't believe it was designed by Zeiss, think it was a Minolta job. But ergonomically it was a lot better than the push pull focus ones. The problem with those is that the zoom often creeps if you're not shooting horizontal! 

I was using it on APS-C so full frame would actually be better for it.

IMHO after going through Zuiko, Leica R, Canon FD and russian Lomos, the contax are the best of the bunch in terms of older lenses. (Yes, they are better than Leica R with the exception of one or two very special R lenses). But what i did notice is that variation between samples was quite large as perhaps can be expected from used lenses. I actually had 4 versions of the Contax 50mm f1.4 at one point and one of them was stunning and the others were okay. (I still have it actually)

I also have a lot of voightlanders which are a fantastic match for the sigma fp. Even so i had some issues with some of those and finally ended up with my first proper Leica M. I wasn't sure how much of the M lenses is just ranting and confirmation bias because it's a Leica (i really didn't gel with the R lenses). But actually the 50mm summicron is a stunning lens. And now finally i'm getting round to selling as much as i can and just focusing on a few of the M lenses. Perhaps all paths lead there!

10 hours ago, MikhailA said:

Solid review . I`d say "not perfect" is an understatement for such  image artifacts. I shot forest a lot and  have noticed some strange flicker  on the trees in some shots, but I didn`t think it is so bad. Now  it  looks more  like  a   serious manufacturing defect. I wonder, does  anybody  from Sigma know about this? Is there any communication channel for bug reports?If it is unrepairable through the firmware, then this is  the end)

I think this is known about? I've reported it and also flickering in the EVF at times. especially low light. However i've not noticed any in footage (yet)

cheers
Paul

10 hours ago, MikhailA said:

Solid review . I`d say "not perfect" is an understatement for such  image artifacts. I shot forest a lot and  have noticed some strange flicker  on the trees in some shots, but I didn`t think it is so bad. Now  it  looks more  like  a   serious manufacturing defect. I wonder, does  anybody  from Sigma know about this? Is there any communication channel for bug reports?If it is unrepairable through the firmware, then this is  the end)

Okay, i had a look at the video now.

As we know, you aren't using an fp for anything other than RAW, there are much better choices on the market. So i think we can ignore any tests with MOV formats.

I may try the resolution stuff myself when i have a moment - my feeling is that these are debayering artefacts, i think it unlikely they are introduced errors from the camera. I do think that how you debayer makes a lot of difference - different algorithms for different uses.

The flickering is not in his video is it? But yours? Do you mean flickering of exposure or the flickering of fine detail as it moves from pixel to pixel? Up to a certain point i think this could be lack of OLPF here...

cheers
Paul

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13 minutes ago, paulinventome said:

IMHO after going through Zuiko, Leica R, Canon FD and russian Lomos, the contax are the best of the bunch in terms of older lenses. (Yes, they are better than Leica R with the exception of one or two very special R lenses). But what i did notice is that variation between samples was quite large as perhaps can be expected from used lenses. I actually had 4 versions of the Contax 50mm f1.4 at one point and one of them was stunning and the others were okay. (I still have it actually)

I also have a lot of voightlanders which are a fantastic match for the sigma fp. Even so i had some issues with some of those and finally ended up with my first proper Leica M. I wasn't sure how much of the M lenses is just ranting and confirmation bias because it's a Leica (i really didn't gel with the R lenses). But actually the 50mm summicron is a stunning lens. And now finally i'm getting round to selling as much as i can and just focusing on a few of the M lenses. Perhaps all paths lead there!

I've had both Contax and Leica R, and Contax is technically better, usually sharper and with significantly better flare resistance. The Contax 50/1.7 is likely the sharpest "old" SLR 50mm I've seen, and I still use the 28/2.8 for stills when travelling, at f4 or smaller it pops in that popular Zeiss way. Contax lenses are also much lighter.

That said, I find the Leica R's more pleasing with digital cameras, in particular the 50mm and 80mm Summiluxes are gorgeous: they provide excellent microcontrast at low lpmm, but not too strong MTF at high lpmm, which actually seems to work quite well with video resolutions. They draw in a way that's both smooth and with well defined detail (perhaps reminiscent of Cookes), and focus fall-off is very nice. The focus rings are also a bit better for pulling I think (compared to Contax).

Are you using M lenses with focus gears? None of the Voigt lenses I have (or had) can be geared, they either have tabs or thin curvy rings.

 

13 minutes ago, paulinventome said:

I may try the resolution stuff myself when i have a moment - my feeling is that these are debayering artefacts, i think it unlikely they are introduced errors from the camera. I do think that how you debayer makes a lot of difference - different algorithms for different uses.

I find that pulling sharpness down to 0 in Resolve's raw settings helps a bit with tricky shots from cameras with no OLPFs. In the case of the fp, these weird pixels might be a result from interactions between debayer algorithm and the way in-camera Bayer scaling is done.

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56 minutes ago, cpc said:

That said, I find the Leica R's more pleasing with digital cameras, in particular the 50mm and 80mm Summiluxes are gorgeous: they provide excellent microcontrast at low lpmm, but not too strong MTF at high lpmm, which actually seems to work quite well with video resolutions. They draw in a way that's both smooth and with well defined detail (perhaps reminiscent of Cookes), and focus fall-off is very nice. The focus rings are also a bit better for pulling I think (compared to Contax).

Are you using M lenses with focus gears? None of the Voigt lenses I have (or had) can be geared, they either have tabs or thin curvy rings.

I think the Rs are good for photography because they tend to show two different renders wide open (glowing) and stopped down, especially the Mandler designed ones (the lux's you quote). I found the 90 summicron very poor with flare, almost unusable. The 24 is not a Leica design and it shows. And the 28mm f2.8 Mark II is excellent. The last version of the 19 pretty good too, much better than the contax 18. 

Yes, i have focus gears for the M lenses. Studio AFS make some aluminium gears that you can twist on, like the Zeiss gears but they do them with scalloped inserts that will hold around the smaller barrels of the Ms. The Zeiss versions don't go small enough. They're really good and easy to twist on and off when needed.

The issue with the Ms are cost. I'm heading for a 90 APO and the latest 28 summicron. But i may have the sell the first born. But actually you get what you pay for (up to a certain point)

1 hour ago, cpc said:

I find that pulling sharpness down to 0 in Resolve's raw settings helps a bit with tricky shots from cameras with no OLPFs. In the case of the fp, these weird pixels might be a result from interactions between debayer algorithm and the way in-camera Bayer scaling is done.

I don't find Resolves debayer very good. I am trying to get some fixes to Nuke that will allow these DNGs to go through there. 

I don't see there being any reason why we should see coloured pixels if the algorithm understands what the content is, right? I mean it's all recreated - so why false colours? In this case i believe this artefacts look like the AHD(?) algorithm.

cheers
Paul

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The German video site Slashcam just ran a new test for using run-of-the-mill SATA SSDs in USB 3.1 enclosures as recording media with the fp:
https://www.slashcam.de/artikel/Kurztest/slashCHECK---Nachgereicht---Guenstige-SATA-SSDs-an-der-Sigma-fp-Teil-2.html

A test they had conducted earlier did fail, but it turns out that you need an enclosure that supports  USB-C 3.1 Gen 2 with, most importantly, the USAP protocol (USB Attached SCSI Protocol). The enclosure they tested, and which meets these standards, is the UGREEN 2.5" USB-C 3.1 Gen 2:

1889--ugreen-ugreen-600.jpg

Turns out that an older Sandisk SanDisk Ultra II 960GB, while performing slightly worse in that housing than the Samsung T5, recorded 4K RAW with the Sigma fp without any trouble or disruption.  

So this might be a budget tip for the camera.

 

 

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2 hours ago, Lars Steenhoff said:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Qwtzi8qmwlE34iHR9-lCgDSx1F596oen/view

The raw files form the test chart in this video have been uploaded

I processed the first frame with Resolve and with Rawtherapee (which includes very fine-grained, expert debayering controls). When tuning the debayering in Rawtherapee, choosing AMaZE as the demosaicing algorithm with 'border' set to 4 and 'False color suppression steps' set to 5, the result is visibly better than from Resolve, but still far from perfect - see the attached frame grabs:
 

A001_001_20191109_000026-raw_therapee.jpg

Rawtherapee

 

A001_001_20191109_000026-resolve_1.1.1.jpg

Resolve

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