Sigma DP1s
The sigma dp1s is the closest i have come with a digital camera to the experience of shooting film. Not because of the files created but because you really don’t know if you got the shot until much later, in this case when you get it on a computer screen. The LCD, if that’s what you want to call it, isn’t any help, it’s a glorified viewfinder/frame counter. As far as colour or exposure forget it, it is more likely to lead you astray than give you accurate information. It is woefully slow to write RAW files to memory and the shutter lag isn’t great either. If you’re expecting me to now say but the images are so great that it makes it all worth while you will be waiting the same length of time it takes to write to the card. I want to like this camera for its sensor but the rest of the photography experience is so poor that it just can’t climb over that hill. Did I mention the vignetting? No, well it’s bad too and has a colour cast. So the bright spot, no not the highlights it blows out, would be that the larger sensor in a compact can give a shallow depth of field look that you otherwise only get from a DSLR. And despite the low resolution of the files they are sharp. (See it took awhile for me to get to that, the file has been saved). I just re-read my first impression from using the DP1s and it’s pretty much the same.
And now for the images, unfortunately they aren’t full resolution so you can see the clarity of the originals, the down-sampled web images are somewhat softer.
Thanks to Duncan Turner of DLT Photographic for lending me the Sigma
In the end the Sigma dp1s is difficult to compare to other cameras so I’ve created this handy visual aid, just say “The Sigma dp1s is” before each line you’ll get the idea.
