Wallace Koopmans Artlog

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.

While I had access to the Sigma Dp1s I set up a quick comparison with my current digital cameras.  The Nikon P7000 and the Pentax K-7.  The image bellow is 100% crops from the same area.  You can see that the DP1s produces a very clean detailed file but there is just no getting around the fact that it is much lower resolution.  As for the K-7 image I shot the DA12-24 at 16mm to make it roughly equivalent in focal length.  I do have better performing lenses but I thought I would make it as fair as possible. 

Here I’ve upscaled the DP1s file to the same size as the K-7 image using photoshop to make a more directcomparison.  So in my estimation the image resolution sits somewhere between the point and shoot P7000 and the DSLR K-7.  The fixed 28mm equivelent F4.0 lens really is quite limiting but if that is what you want in a point and shoot this camera will work. 

I’ve read that the Dp1s makes a good landscape camera,

but I find it hard to see, unless your printing at a relatively small size.  The images that I did have printed seem to suggest a maximum printing size of around 11×14.  In the end I’m not so interested in whether Foveon is a better technology than Bayer filter sensors.  It is a camera that does one thing at one focal length, and that’s OK, but the market has moved on with camera’s like the Fuji x100 while Sigma has made minor updates to the same products.  As the DP series of cameras exists today it’s hard to make a valid case for purchasing one paritcularly with their high asking price.

A friend offered to lend me his Sigma Dp1s so that I might sip from the sweet Foveon Kool Aid.  OK those weren’t his words or likely his intent, thanks Duncan.  Let me be clear though this camera has some major shortcomings that can’t be ignored.  It’s slow, the sort of slow where I could load a roll of film faster than it can write a file to a card.  The rear LCD appears to exist to show your settings and to confirm that yes you did capture something.   The metering also did some serious highlight clipping even when I had -1 exposure compensation, of course I had no way of knowing this until I got the files into my computer (see previous sentence).  For all other complaints please refer to the rest of the Internet.  Now for the positive side and where the argument for the purpose of this camera begins.  It produces nice sharp noise free files with accurate colours.  It has a 16mm f4.0 lens on an APSC sized sensor which is unique and while on the slow side it performs very well.  The close focus distance is quite long at 30cm so that does limit some of the creative possibilities.  I guess for me the unanswered question now is how large an image can be rendered from these files.  As is well documented the sensor captures 3 colours at different layers but the file dimensions are 2640×1760 however you slice it.  Aside from the issues of speed I actually like the simplicity of the camera and it’s compactness.  I was able to configure the otherwise useless (wide/tele) buttons to control ISO, why does a camera with a fixed focal length have these controls?  This arrangement ends up in practice being the best of any camera I have ever used, wide decreases ISO, tele increases ISO, simple and immediate making ISO the third variable much like my DSLR.  I easily moved between ISO 50 to 400 and even found ISO 800 to be largely noise free.  So while I will reserve any final verdict until I have seen an image printed, it appears that the only thing standing in this cameras way from being a good photographic tool is it’s glacial speed, and exposure system.  Whether these issues are adequately addressed with the latest version the Dp1x I can’t say but any improvement in speed would be welcome.