New camera good enough?

[Tommy]

I have a three star QC rating with my DSLR. I just bought a Canon EOS 6Mii. The images are boarder line to my eye. Can I send three in to see if they pass or is that going to ruin my QC rating?

[spacecadet]

On 17/11/2019 at 16:00, Tommy said:

I have a three star QC rating with my DSLR. I just bought a Canon EOS 6Mii. The images are boarder line to my eye. Can I send three in to see if they pass or is that going to ruin my QC rating?

You only send 3 images for initial QC. Any subsequent ones go through QC as normal.

Assuming you mead Canon 6D, it's fine. If your images are borderline, look to your technique.

[Tommy]

Thanks for the reply. I wanted reassurance that the Canon could, with care, produce acceptable images.

[Harry Harrison]

32.5 MP APS-C sensor, should be way better than minimum QC, you make it sound as if it might be marginal. Will depend upon the lenses rather than the camera, and just standard 'cameracraft'.

 

What is making them borderline to your eyes?

Edited November 19, 2019 by Harry Harrison

[Tommy]

My initial shots were quite noisy. I have experimented with Lightroom settings and had images accepted. I wondered if anyone else had used the camera.

[Normspics]

The camera is good enough, the specs are great a nice compact travel camera with APS-C sensor, firstly if you think your images are marginal don’t submit them, work on some new ones and for stock photography take control of your iso, I rarely shoot anything above 400 iso, if the image needs more iso I use a tripod or support then use the self timer and lower the shutter speed using a low iso and shutter speed. Most of my stock images are travel editorial and in bright sunshine or in the golden hours and I use 100 to 200 iso. Just be aware of keeping low iso aperture in the mid range f5.6 to f8 for good depth of field and focus and use higher shutter speeds as you use zoom longer focal length lenses. When processing your images some contributors will reduce the image size by -10 to -20% to help with sharpness and digital noise. Best of luck and enjoy your new camera.

[Tommy]

Thanks for this reply. I have been doing something along the lines you suggest and produced good images. I agree with your comments on the camera. 

[Harry Harrison]

Should be fine, a very good 'Alamy' camera I would think but I'm sure the forum would be interested to know if has any quality weaknesses. I don't know it at all but I'm sure you know that it has the same sensor as the Canon EOS 90D which DPReview have reviewed in depth:

 

https://www.alamy.com/search/imageresults.aspx?&xstx=0&userid={E04F75D7-9329-4327-A26D-97FC7C43FD97}&name=Olivier+Parent&st=12

 

They criticise the standard sharpening of jpegs but otherwise it does well,  I imagine you're probably shooting RAW anyway. Enjoy it.

[AlexG]

Good points above, shoot iso-400 max, or 800 if really necessary. Most cameras should handle 400 well. Also, the sharpness is greatly dependent on the lens used, less on the camera body.

[Tommy]

The camera allows 640 ISO which I find is a good upper limit for November. Now I am used to the camera and handling its image files I love it.

[formerly snappyoncalifornia]

My 2 cents. When the Nikon D7100 came out I was very happy to purchase it because I knew that at 24 megapixels it exceeded Alamy's minimum requirements.  My submissions continually failed for noise and I was shocked to see how much color noise was being generated even at low iso images.  I did a lot of technical reading to understand what was going on and learned a lot about "pixel pitch" and noise. Without getting lost in the weeds here's a brief explanation.  Think of photo sites (pixels) as buckets that hold light, not water. The bigger they are,  the more light they hold. But if they are small, or too close together, which is measured as pixel pitch, the light spills over to an adjacent bucket, that's noise. Modern sensors and software get around these issues by something called "pixel binning" which mops up the spillage.  Light gathering capabilities of lenses come into play as well.  The rule of thumb seems to be avoid cameras with sensors that have a pixel pitch below 4 microns. When I looked up the number for my Nikon d7100 it was one of the lowest for any nikon camera 3.9. Compare that with the D700 at 8.4. I won't be making that mistake again. Apparently squeezing smaller photosites onto sensors to get the consumer to believe more megapixels means better images is good marketing. I now check pixel pitch religiously. 

Edited December 19, 2019 by formerly snappyoncalifornia

[Harry Harrison]

4 hours ago, formerly snappyoncalifornia said:

Apparently squeezing smaller photosites onto sensors to get the consumer to believe more megapixels means better images is good marketing. I now check pixel pitch religiously.

You're absolutely correct to explain why increasing pixel density on a small sensor involves compromises over, say, the same number of pixels on a full-frame sensor. In this case I think that 32.5MP on the 22.3 x 14.9 mm Canon APS-C sensor is more than anyone else has tried to do on a mainstream camera and also the Canon APS-C sensor is around 10% smaller than Nikon's APS-C at 23.5 x 15.6 mm. If these 32.5 megapixels were copied across on to a full-frame camera at the same density you would have an 84MP sensor!

 

However, time moves on and this will be a much better sensor than the one on the the D7100 and provided that the advice above is taken about being cautious at restricting ISO to maybe 400/800 then there shouldn't be any techical issues for Alamy. The DPReview examination of image quality and noise from the Canon 90D, which has the same sensor, is pretty complimentary:

 

https://www.dpreview.com/reviews/canon-eos-90d-review/5

 

Edit:

Actually I was forgetting about the smaller sensor cameras, the Sony RX100 series are very popular on here if used carefully and they give 20.1 MP from a 13.2 x 8.8 mm 1" sensor, this density on full frame would give 142 MP.

Edited December 19, 2019 by Harry Harrison

[M.Chapman]

6 hours ago, formerly snappyoncalifornia said:

The rule of thumb seems to be avoid cameras with sensors that have a pixel pitch below 4 microns. When I looked up the number for my Nikon d7100 it was one of the lowest for any nikon camera 3.9. Compare that with the D700 at 8.4. I won't be making that mistake again. Apparently squeezing smaller photosites onto sensors to get the consumer to believe more megapixels means better images is good marketing. I now check pixel pitch religiously. 

 

Whilst it's true that more MP is not necessarily better, technology keeps advancing. The Sony RX100 does a really good job with 2.4um pixel pitch on a 20MP 1" sensor. It uses a  back illuminated CMOS sensor to ensure more photons reach the photo-sites. Micro-lens arrays also can play a part (I don't know if Sony RX100 also uses this). But it also depends on how far you want to push the ISO setting. In single shot mode I don't tend to venture above ISO 400 on my Sony RX100 Mk3, but it does have some clever multi-exposure tricks it can use in low light.

 

Mark

 

 

Edited December 19, 2019 by M.Chapman

[zxzoomy]

I have a nikon D3100. It appears to have a higher pixel pitch than the later D3200, D3300, D3400 and D3500. Does that mean it's better in this context? 

Edited December 28, 2019 by zxzoomy
error

[Harry Harrison]

9 hours ago, zxzoomy said:

Does that mean it's better in this context? 

Well, there are other factors that go into the design and improvement of camera sensors as Mark has described above, but according to the conclusions in this DPreview on its immediate successor, the D3200, then the jump from 14.5MP to 24MP doesn't necessarily produce the corresponding jump in image quality, especially with the kit lens:

 

https://www.dpreview.com/reviews/nikon-d3200/21