JPEG's, Our Dirty Little Secret

ptpdprinter said:
I have no interest in buying a Leica or any other rangefinder digital camera. If one is a rangefinder enthusiast, I can see the attraction of this camera at 1/3rd the cost of a Leica.
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It is not the cost that attracts me. Granted RF is a special case. But, hey, what is the name of the website you are posting on? Check it out. ;o)

I have the Leicas, they have their flaws but I like them. And despite what DxO says, I find the M9 images really good. M8(.2), too. I have the Sony A7M III which has very nice color. I still like the M9 color better. And from Mattias Burling's review the Pixii color is very, very good. I'll go along with him and put it in the M9 class. I am looking forward to his next Pixii review, and even more to my own, presented right here! LOL No video, just my usual prolix gas.

Again, I am really stoked. Barth et cie, don't let me down. ;o)

NB - I do not and I hope you do not think I am any great photographer. I am just a hack out there having some fun with some high-priced, high-tech toys and squandering what would have all gone to my heirs. I take pictures to please myself. If they please you, all the better. But it is primarily self-indulgence.
 
Like (seemingly) the majority of posters here, I tend to shoot RAW most of the time. But like so much else in life, it depends.

If I'm at home and just want quick images for posting, usually I set the camera to JPEG. Cat photos aren't fine art (okay, they can be), and as all I want to do with them is to crop to remove the clutter and rubbish int he backgrounds, maybe tilt them a little as one of my eyes is wonky and views everything at a slight angle, reduce the JPEG copies to a manageable size, and then post them.

When I'm on the road, mostly in Southeast Asia with a heavy emphasis on travel in Indonesia and Sarawak, I shoot RAW, or RAW+JPEG. Sure, it makes for big files, and many files, but WD portable hard disks are inexpensive now and they don't take up much space in my travel bag, so I download every day (and at times twice daily) and it suits me.

(I know, I know, I should keep all my DSLRs set to RAW+JPEG, but being human, I dither. Anyway, yes, for the most part, they are set on R+J for 80%-90% of the time, if that satisfies the site's critics.)

A few years ago, purely on a whim, I decided to test my Nikon DSLRs to see how they performed with shooting the two separately, and making side by side comparisons. Oddly, I learned that my D700s were better with RAW than JPEG, so I now mostly keep them set them on the former and they have largely stayed there since. However, my D800s do equally well with the two formats, so I decide at the time which I want to use - usually the 'combo'.

Recently I bought a Fuji XT2, but I've yet to put it to this test. When I have time, I will. It should make for some interesting results - I briefly tried an XT1 but found the colors it produced at every setting were too wide off the mark from my D700 and D800 colors and for me it's important to keep the color palette consistent. So I went to the XT2 and so far it pleases me, though my learning curve has a way to go yet before I'm comfortable with using it for my serious image-making.

All this to'ing and fro'ing has resulted in a dozen WP portable disks of various sizes, all either full or filling up super fast as I'm also scanning thousands of negatives taken from 1962 to the present day and I save the image files as TIFFS, but this is opening yet another can of worms, so let's not get into it...
 
peterm1 said:
What I would enjoy seeing is a camera which is able to load third party profiles which are menu selectable within the camera.
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That is what I meant. It is possible to create custom profiles and load them within the camera. Apparently the workflow is a bit experimental and not yet in the manual. But we will probably get there.

I’m the guy that made that video BTW, “M.B” 🙂
Yes, the camera can shoot raw DNG in monochrome. And it’s not just a baked in picture profile. You can’t switch back to color after fact.
 
M.B said:
That is what I meant. It is possible to create custom profiles and load them within the camera. Apparently the workflow is a bit experimental and not yet in the manual. But we will probably get there.

I’m the guy that made that video BTW, “M.B” 🙂
Yes, the camera can shoot raw DNG in monochrome. And it’s not just a baked in picture profile. You can’t switch back to color after fact.
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Cool. I did not realize that you are the MB I watch quite often on Youtube. I like your videos and enjoy watching them.

Now, as to the Pixii. To me the ability to shoot in monochrome and save them as RAW files (rather than JPG) is pretty significant as I know of no other camera that can do this. Of course I do not understand what the technical issues are with this or whether these RAW / DNG mono files are as good as the ones that come out of a Leica Monochrom sensor. It would be interesting to see that comparison. And the ability to create and load custom profiles into the camera is also an excellent step forward.

I am strangely interested!
 
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AlwaysOnAuto said:
I shoot jpg's all the time.
They look just fine.
I don't have any software to work RAW files at least not now, so jpg's are where it's at for me. My editing skills aren't as good as they should be, so I let the cameras do it. So far I'm satisfied.
YMMV.
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Darktable and RawTherapee are both DNG editors and both are free. Barth mentions Darktable FWIW.
 
boojum said:
So, who is shooting JPG's? How do they look? What is the write time compared to DNG's? Anonymous posts in answer will be accepted. ;o)

....
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If I owned a PIXII Digital M camera I would not use in-camera JPEGs.

But that goes for any camera. This includes smart phone (iPhone) photographs where I use DNG with Lightroom Mobile (camera function) or the iOS 645 Pro Mk III app.

Smart phone images that are used for temporary purposes (documentation, reminders and friend/family messaging) are .HEIC files. Somehow these appear as JPEGs or PNGs on Android products. I have no idea how this happens.
 
I have just had my Pixii restored. The color profiles were gone but David Barth walked me through the simple process of restoring them and now it has all the profiles it was born with. And I find that it writes DNG quickly but when writing a JPG files i get "busy" in the viewfinder for roughly 10 to 12 seconds. Anyone else experiencing this?
 
boojum said:
I have just had my Pixii restored. The color profiles were gone but David Barth walked me through the simple process of restoring them and now it has all the profiles it was born with. And I find that it writes DNG quickly but when writing a JPG files i get "busy" in the viewfinder for roughly 10 to 12 seconds. Anyone else experiencing this?
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Sounds odd that any camera should do this but if I had to guess it also sounds to me like its processor if slow/struggling. JPGs need more processing to "cook" the final image than DNGs. I suppose it raises a question in my mind about whether this is worse with some JPG settings than with others. Also was it happening before your camera was "restored". (Mind you I do not have your camera so am just working from first principles).
 
peterm1 said:
Sounds odd that any camera should do this but if I had to guess it also sounds to me like its processor if slow/struggling. JPGs need more processing to "cook" the final image than DNGs. I suppose it raises a question in my mind about whether this is worse with some JPG settings than with others. Also was it happening before your camera was "restored". (Mind you I do not have your camera so am just working from first principles).
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I do not remember how it was working before. I do know that I was not shooting a lot in succession before. I was now just to see how the camera handled them. The images are fine. The Pixii does not seem to have the M9's saturated colors but a nice slightly softer color. I will have to test side by side, same lens.
 
boojum said:
Pixii looks like the past from the outside. Inside it is an all new and overdue approach. Perhaps of little interest to you but very exciting to me. The Pixii is more than a refinement of yesterday. It is today and may well be tomorrow. What other camera can say that? Name one.
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Perhaps the smartphone? Or what about the full frame Sigma Foveon? There also was an attempt made with the Lytro Illum.
 
jankapp said:
Perhaps the smartphone? Or what about the full frame Sigma Foveon? There also was an attempt made with the Lytro Illum.
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I know nothing of the cameras you mention. The Pixii is an RF camera taking Leica mount lenses which is just about all electronic, You have a computer with a manual lens hanging on it. I would think this means that it can be modified more easily than a mechanical camera once you write the software. They are solidly built. They were reviled for having only internal fixed memory. I see Hasselblad has the same now, with an additional CF card capability but the heavy lifting is done by the 1TB internal memory. It may be that cameras are changing. It may be progress.
 
jsrockit said:
What am I missing here? This does not exist yet does it?
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Correct. I should have mentioned an existing Foveon. I have the DP1S, all electronic from 2010(?).
The other all electronic one I mentioned - the Lytro Illum - does exist on Ebay only. 🙂
Nicely built in hardware and software, but the depth management requires some study.
 
M.B said:
It doesn’t have any settings as far as I know except for picture profiles. Fuji’s film simulations is if where honest, just a fancy name for the same thing, picture profiles.

The picture profiles on the Pixii is using an Adobe standard and are easy to locate in the camera when hooked up to a computer. I know there are users that have started making their own and loading them onto the camera. I will probably have a go at it for fun at some point.
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A great number of camera brands use sets of proprietary, in-camera, image rending parameters. All these fancy names are protected by trademark. This is called marketing. The purpose is to increase market share.

It makes sense to use the an Adobe standard. This eliminates a great deal of time and effort for the vendor. Photographers who prefer not to use the Adobe standard can always use raw files and create their own sets of rendering parameters.

Leica chose a similar, but not identical tactic when the adopted the DNG standard for their raw files. Leica did not waste resources defining, implementing and testing their own raw file format.
 
willie_901 said:
A great number of camera brands use sets of proprietary, in-camera, image rending parameters. All these fancy names are protected by trademark. This is called marketing. The purpose is to increase market share.
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I don't see JPG profiles as being a big draw. Someone is trying to choose between Sony, Nikon, and Canon and the deciding factor is JPG profiles? I guess it could happen. Probably not.
 
ptpdprinter said:
I don't see JPG profiles as being a big draw. Someone is trying to choose between Sony, Nikon, and Canon and the deciding factor is JPG profiles? I guess it could happen. Probably not.
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I agree.

At the same time the almost every brand spends resources creating and marketing in-camera JPEG rendering profiles. So, either all these brands are throwing money away or enough people are interested in how in-camera JPEGs look to make the investment useful.
 
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