Wallace Koopmans Artlog

These are from a mix of digital cameras (Pentax K7, Pentax Q, Sigma DP1s)

I don’t think I’ve ever come across a camera with less online information about it. It’s as if there was a cover up. Like Sigma wanted this camera and any information about it wiped off the face of the earth. I don’t blame them. When I first came across this camera the rubbery plastic it’s made from was all sticky I thought maybe that was a one-off but I’ve since found an even stickier Sigma Zoom 50 (that’s the almost identical camera with a 50 to 100mm lens) Once I rendered the camera holdable I needed to put a battery in it. Backing up just a little the camera appears rugged and perhaps weather resistant but far from it the battery door is the flimsiest loose plastic that is jammed by the carrying strap. Once you manage to get the battery in you can start the adventure. The lens is of the zoom variety covering 28 to 50mm with an undetermined aperture. It does have a nicely placed shutter button and an actual hotshoe, I needed to say something nice. I had a notion in my mind that as a lens manufacturer that this camera might have some promise as a wide-angle film option but the lens really isn’t designed to cover the entire frame of 35mm film. I can’t recall any camera having worse vingetting, not even the Vivitar Ultra Wide and Slim with its 22mm lens. You don’t believe me well look at this……

No point crying I gave you ample warning. We tend to applaud and celebrate out of the box thinking but maybe just maybe sometimes you should keep a few ideas inside or ever to yourself. I challenge anyone reading this blog post to come up with the specifications for this camera, you will win my coveted admiration. and a mention in the update.

If you find a few of these images vaguely familiar it may be that you have previously seen my post about the Sigma DP1s which I used at the same time.

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.