Soft Sony images compared to Nikon

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Dear lhab, there are no two pictures, this is the picture....
Ah ok, got you! Thanks for clarifying. Although, given that you have a Sony and a Nikon, I am really interested in seeing how these two different cameras differ with image quality of the same subject under the same conditions. If you ever post anything similar showing these photos, I'd love to peak and have a look. I know there are tons of reviews on the internet, but I prefer talking to an owner of both and see/download their images if possible.

Thanks
 
Ah ok, got you! Thanks for clarifying. Although, given that you have a Sony and a Nikon, I am really interested in seeing how these two different cameras differ with image quality of the same subject under the same conditions. If you ever post anything similar showing these photos, I'd love to peak and have a look. I know there are tons of reviews on the internet, but I prefer talking to an owner of both and see/download their images if possible.

Thanks

I have to images here, top imagde is from the Sony last weekend, the second is from the Nikon 1 year ago. Both are taken with ISO500, 559mm (Sony) versus 500mm (Nikon) , F6.3 (Sony) versus F5 (Nikon). 1/1600th for the Sony and 1/2000th for the Nikon. Both are taken from a steady ground. Tripod versus groundpod, both with a swinghead.

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Ah ok, got you! Thanks for clarifying. Although, given that you have a Sony and a Nikon, I am really interested in seeing how these two different cameras differ with image quality of the same subject under the same conditions. If you ever post anything similar showing these photos, I'd love to peak and have a look. I know there are tons of reviews on the internet, but I prefer talking to an owner of both and see/download their images if possible.

Thanks

Please let me know what your thoughts are
 
Please let me know what your thoughts are
I have seen both, and they both look great photos. Of course, I can't tell you which one is better as they are two different compositions in two different times, in different situations, different subjects,and it would be naive from me to tell you the Sony image quality is better or worse than that of the Nikon. The ideal situation here, if we want to compare the image quality of two different manufacturers, is to have both cameras set on the same subject on the same time, and relatively the same settings and equipment used, and compare the two outcomes. This would be a fair and honest comparison. But in your case, all I can say is that both are great photos but I cannot say much more because they come from different composition time, location, settings, and subject.
Thanks for sharing your art, I envy you as I'm not a wildlife shooter nor have the equipment for wildlife photography
 
FWIW I was out yesterday and instead of focusing on video I decided to try my a1 & 200-600G to capture some Bluebird stills. I can't provide any meaningful direct comparisons to my former Nikon gear, but my impressions are that when it comes to IQ, the a1 is very similar to the D850 and Z7. That is, when it comes to IQ the a1 requires just a much shot discipline as the D850/Z7 to get the most out of it. The 200-600G did a decent job, but I felt the contrast was better with the Nikon primes and I really missed not having f4 which would have helped maintain the minimum 1/4000 shutter speed and keep ISO below 800 to ensure a sharp image at the pixel level.

As for the number of "keepers", that's where the a1 shines -- I took home more BIF keepers in a couple of hours shooting as I did in an entire year with my Nikon equipment . The a1 seemed to know exactly what I was trying to do, but it doesn't change the laws of physics!

Here's a quick example that I thought was just "OK" though the ISO (1250) was still too high and I needed to be closer to fill the frame better (this is from a 0.75 linear crop)...

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As for the number of "keepers", that's where the a1 shines -- I took home more BIF keepers in a couple of hours shooting as I did in an entire year with my Nikon equipment . The a1 seemed to know exactly what I was trying to do, but it doesn't change the laws of physics!
Impressive and stunning! I hope Nikon catches up with the Sony IQ for my brand new Z6ii that arrived 3 hours ago! It is now a matter of Software development and IQ artificial intelligence where these cameras show their potentials
 
Ah ok, got you! Thanks for clarifying. Although, given that you have a Sony and a Nikon, I am really interested in seeing how these two different cameras differ with image quality of the same subject under the same conditions. If you ever post anything similar showing these photos, I'd love to peak and have a look. I know there are tons of reviews on the internet, but I prefer talking to an owner of both and see/download their images if possible.

Thanks
I have just what you are looking for. I bought an a1 to try out and I have spent a lot of time (over 20K images in the last month) learning the a1 to have an informed opinion of the camera. I am a Nikon shooter and will be doing a comparison very soon, just behind on editing. Watch for a new thread coming soon.
 
I have seen both, and they both look great photos. Of course, I can't tell you which one is better as they are two different compositions in two different times, in different situations, different subjects,and it would be naive from me to tell you the Sony image quality is better or worse than that of the Nikon. The ideal situation here, if we want to compare the image quality of two different manufacturers, is to have both cameras set on the same subject on the same time, and relatively the same settings and equipment used, and compare the two outcomes. This would be a fair and honest comparison. But in your case, all I can say is that both are great photos but I cannot say much more because they come from different composition time, location, settings, and subject.
Thanks for sharing your art, I envy you as I'm not a wildlife shooter nor have the equipment for wildlife photography

Very true, this came as close to the same situation as possible. :)
 
Impressive and stunning! I hope Nikon catches up with the Sony IQ for my brand new Z6ii that arrived 3 hours ago! It is now a matter of Software development and IQ artificial intelligence where these cameras show their potentials

Have fun with the Z6II, it is a fine camera!!
 
Hello Anton,

I had a similar experience as yours when i briefly tried the Sony mirrorless system. My primary Nikon gear is a Nikon D850+400 2.8E and 200-500G as a walk around lens. When i tried the Sony A7R4 with the 200-600G, I was initially so impressed with how amazing the AF tracking/ dancing dots were on the EVF but was shocked when i reviewed the images 1:1 on a 4K screen. Most of my images of moving subjects were not critically sharp while the same combo was exceptional on static subjects (just the image sharpness). I sent back the combo to Sony and received it with a nice message that said "everything works as it should". After trying all possible changes in the settings i realized this was a problem several R4+200-600 users were reporting so i sold the R4 and bought a used A9 and this time things were much better but again, when it came to the critical sharpness when photographing moving subjects, I was never 100% happy with the Sony files and always felt the focal plane was not 100% accurate...there was a program that i could download that showed the focus points on the Sony files and it never matched with what i saw on the EVF while photographing an action sequence..Whereas on the Nikon View NXi, 90% of the time if i focused on a particular area, my focus confirmation box is dead-on. This is something that Thom Hogan keeps saying about the Sony AF just missing the plane of focus very narrowly...Now, even with the files that were good, i could never make those look like Nikon...it is not just about the colors but i felt the way my Nikon lenses (even the 200-500G) rendered an image, there was something special to it compared to Sony. Again, this is just my very limited experience with Sony/ personal preference and i dont intend starting a brand war here :)
 
While I am still learning the Sony A1 what I notice on the pro side is of course the speed and accuracy of the AF system. I also think the customization options are a bit superior to the Nikon D850 likely on a par with the D6 although I am still plodding up the learning curve. I am also impressed with the color rendering which is on a par with the superb D850. One obvious issue is file volume - at 30 FPS one has a ton to choose from and has been mentioned on this thread the weight of that number is daunting to go through in LR - too much good stuff! On the con side, I note that one has to push the SS up to much higher levels than the D850 (3500 to 4000 +) to capture BIF. The resulting high ISO appears (remember I am coming up the curve) to be noticeably worse than the D850 which is able to do a great job at far less (~2-2.5k) SS and absorb the noise better (to my eye). Now of course, I am typically shooting the Nikon at f/5.6 (500mm f/4 +1.4TC) so I have greater reach and lower ISO for a start - like a stop at least - so therein may lie the story. All that said, the Sony A1 noise is in no way obnoxious and the trade between AF agility, FPS, bird AF, weight, size, versus the D850 combo above is worth it. Not sure I like the Sony for low light however the reviews are quite positive in that regard. Finally, if the Nikon team can make the Z9 20 fps (not certain 30 FPS is a deal breaker for 99% of action photographers) , competing AF to the A1, D6 like customization, 4k video (plenty for next few years) EVF with 240hz update like the A1 they will have gained most if not all of the lost ground. Finally, they have to leverage the Nikon advantage in lens - design interoperability with the greatest number of new and old lens possible - after all, investment in the Nikon lens ecosystem is what's making most of us stay with Nikon as the switching costs are simply too high. What the A1 achieves is a MUCH higher keeper rate than the D850 for action shots, especially birds in flight, that despite my love for the Nikon system has made my mind up about adding it to my bag. If the Z9 comes at or close to the performance envelop of the A1 then back to all Nikon I go.
 
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Hello Anton,

I had a similar experience as yours when i briefly tried the Sony mirrorless system. My primary Nikon gear is a Nikon D850+400 2.8E and 200-500G as a walk around lens. When i tried the Sony A7R4 with the 200-600G, I was initially so impressed with how amazing the AF tracking/ dancing dots were on the EVF but was shocked when i reviewed the images 1:1 on a 4K screen. Most of my images of moving subjects were not critically sharp while the same combo was exceptional on static subjects (just the image sharpness). I sent back the combo to Sony and received it with a nice message that said "everything works as it should". After trying all possible changes in the settings i realized this was a problem several R4+200-600 users were reporting so i sold the R4 and bought a used A9 and this time things were much better but again, when it came to the critical sharpness when photographing moving subjects, I was never 100% happy with the Sony files and always felt the focal plane was not 100% accurate...there was a program that i could download that showed the focus points on the Sony files and it never matched with what i saw on the EVF while photographing an action sequence..Whereas on the Nikon View NXi, 90% of the time if i focused on a particular area, my focus confirmation box is dead-on. This is something that Thom Hogan keeps saying about the Sony AF just missing the plane of focus very narrowly...Now, even with the files that were good, i could never make those look like Nikon...it is not just about the colors but i felt the way my Nikon lenses (even the 200-500G) rendered an image, there was something special to it compared to Sony. Again, this is just my very limited experience with Sony/ personal preference and i dont intend starting a brand war here :)

Thanks for sharing your experience, for me there is no brand war here, I am just trying to find out if my feeling is "correct", you als like some others in this thread confirm my feelings but the superiority of the Sony in many of the aspects like AF, FPS are also very clear. Once I rented the A7R4 with the 200-600 mm and I was very dissapointed in that combination, on the back of the camera everything looked fine till I looked at them on the big screen.
 
While I am still learning the Sony A1 what I notice on the pro side is of course the speed and accuracy of the AF system. I also think the customization options are a bit superior to the Nikon D850 likely on a par with the D6 although I am still plodding up the learning curve. I am also impressed with the color rendering which is on a par with the superb D850. One obvious issue is file volume - at 30 FPS one has a ton to choose from and has been mentioned on this thread the weight of that number is daunting to go through in LR - too much good stuff! On the con side, I note that one has to push the SS up to much higher levels than the D850 (3500 to 4000 +) to capture BIF. The resulting high ISO appears (remember I am coming up the curve) to be noticeably worse than the D850 which is able to do a great job at far less (~2-2.5k) SS and absorb the noise better (to my eye). Now of course, I am typically shooting the Nikon at f/5.6 (500mm f/4 +1.4TC) so I have greater reach and lower ISO for a start - like a stop at least - so therein may lie the story. All that said, the Sony A1 noise is in no way obnoxious and the trade between AF agility, FPS, bird AF, weight, size, versus the D850 combo above is worth it. Not sure I like the Sony for low light however the reviews are quite positive in that regard. Finally, if the Nikon team can make the Z9 20 fps (not certain 30 FPS is a deal breaker for 99% of action photographers) , competing AF to the A1, D6 like customization, 4k video (plenty for next few years) EVF with 240hz update like the A1 they will have gained most if not all of the lost ground. Finally, they have to leverage the Nikon advantage in lens - design interoperability with the greatest number of new and old lens possible - after all, investment in the Nikon lens ecosystem is what's making most of us stay with Nikon as the switching costs are simply too high. What the A1 achieves is a MUCH higher keeper rate than the D850 for action shots, especially birds in flight, that despite my love for the Nikon system has made my mind up about adding it to my bag. If the Z9 comes at or close to the performance envelop of the A1 then back to all Nikon I go.

I do hope Nikon will come with a A1 like camera in the Z9 so I can keep on using the Nikon Eco system, but we'll just have to wait a little longer ;)
 
I highly doubt that, at least for photographers shooting raw images. It would be hard to implement an algorithm that substantially changed the image in terms of sharpness and still delivered as a pre-converted raw file and did so at the kinds of frame rates supported by Sony cameras. Topaz products take a long time to do their magic even on a fast desktop computer, doing that at 10-20+ frames per second in camera and then saving the adjusted image as a raw file would be a very good trick.
If I understand you correctly, your position is that the RAW file is rendered entirely by light & the quality of the lens with no contribution from the camera other than to record the image as rendered?
 
Can't follow this at all. "the images are not realistic". "an unreal appearance". If you were right you'd have to be talking about a JPG produced from the in camera processing and the settings used can be tweaked by the photographer. I don't understand how these comments could be applied to a RAW image unless there was heavy unrealistic editing.

For example, what is unrealistic about this image. Taken in RAW with some light editing in LrC. No topaz and no noise reduction in LrC either.

The colours are realistic.View attachment 18201
Obviously I was not referencing your image having never seen it before. I apologize if you feel I disparaged your camera.
 
If I understand you correctly, your position is that the RAW file is rendered entirely by light & the quality of the lens with no contribution from the camera other than to record the image as rendered?
A raw image is data read in analog form from the sensor, then digitized in an A/D with possible digital gain added post digitization and in some camera architectures variable analog gain added prior to digitization with those gains being determined by the camera's ISO setting. That and information on the Bayer filter to support correct demosaicing. That's the primary image information and then metadata concerning camera settings and other things like a small embedded jpeg are added to the raw file.

It's already a lot to read all of that off the sensor, buffer it and save it to a memory card at modern camera resolutions and frame rates. So no, it's not just the light and lens there's quite a bit of hardware and firmware based signal processing but the image isn't even an image yet in a saved raw file it is really luminance data from the photo sites prior to the demosaicing step that turns it into a viewable image. It would be an interesting challenge to do noise reduction or sharpening on the raw data before it's been rendered into red, green and blue channel information.

A jpeg out of the camera is a different story and in that case the image is demosaiced in camera and editing is performed on that image including things like sharpening and noise reduction via dedicated image processors. A lot more could reasonably be done to in-camera jpegs.

I'm not saying it's impossible but given the time it takes the Topaz products to do their thing on RGB image files I'd be amazed if Sony or anyone else could do similar things using the in-camera processors at 20+ frames per second and to do that on raw data before its even demosaiced into an RGB image.
 
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Obviously I was not referencing your image having never seen it before. I apologize if you feel I disparaged your camera.
No worries. I didn't take that view at all. All I was doing was showing a typical image that was neither unrealistic nor of an unreal appearance which is where we came in.
 
A raw file is nothing more than a table of numbers from 0 to 16383 if it's a 14 bit camera reflecting the monochromatic luminance values for each pixel, plus a header for all the camera settings. The special sauce is in the demosaicing, and if you use Adobe as the raw converter you don't even get the camera maker's special sauce.
 
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A raw file is nothing more than a table of numbers from 0 to 16383 if it's a 14 bit camera reflecting the monochromatic luminance values for each pixel, plus a header for all the camera settings. The special sauce is in the demosaicing, and if you use Adobe as the raw converter you don't even get the camera maker's special sauce.

The difference in "raw" files from different camera makers is not in the table of numbers I assume, but in the internal electronics, color filter and micro lenses on the sensor, and of course the lens that goes on the camera. Added all together, you get pronounced differences in how raw files look.
 
The difference in "raw" files from different camera makers is not in the table of numbers I assume, but in the internal electronics, color filter and micro lenses on the sensor, and of course the lens that goes on the camera. Added all together, you get pronounced differences in how raw files look.
I agree, but I think the biggest difference is in the software that chooses which method of demosaicing to apply and which camera profiles to offer. Once a value from a sensor photosite is written by the camera into the raw file it only knows that it's value is, say 13824 worth of red. The software then looks at that red pixel and its blue and green neighbors and the various settings we've dialed in and assigns a red, green, blue value to that pixel. Look how different the same raw file is just by scrolling different profiles in Lightroom or the camera maker's software. None of those are the 'true' Nikon or Canon or Sony appearance. They are just applications of different lookup tables and settings to the raw numbers.
 
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