Preview: ISO 1600 raw battle 5D Mark III, Kineraw S35, Blackmagic Cinema Camera

[Andrew Reid]

 

Graded as closely to match as possible - Download the frames as JPEGs - http://we.tl/0DYPaHNkUG

 

Colour certainly a huge leap from the others on the 5D Mark III at this ISO.

 

White balance and tint vary wildly between the three.

[userage]

Dafuq, are they all exposed/graded properly? The 5D's colour stands out like crazy, the Kineraw and BM are pretty evenly matched though

[Andrew Reid]

Yes they are graded and exposed to precision. The colour is just flat out better on the 5D 3 at this ISO. It's an extraordinary sensor. Kineraw goes up to ISO 12,800 and is much cleaner than BMCC in terms of noise.

[Pierre_move]

I'm right now at a grading studio with our guys trying to finish a deadline and during a little break (procrastination as usual) we decided that from these pics we would chose the Kineraw as the one with the most useful colors.

 

The most visible thing is that Both 5D and BMCC fail at capturing the color of the Candle. Plus 5D has alot of funky unnecessary colors that need to be tamed which is extra work.

[QuickHitRecord]

At a glance, the 5D looks the best to my eye, but that pesky fixed pattern noise (vertical lines) is pushing me towards the KineRaw on this one.

[peederj]

What's going on is the 5D3 RAW converter being applied is boosting the saturation. In Aperture it's boosted all the way up by default, which is too much for most tastes. The sensor itself isn't so saturated, it's linear, but Adobe or Apple or whoever made your RAW converter thinks you want to be a mini Ken Rockwell and saturate the hell out of everything you shoot. This is just something you need to learn about RAW converters...they do a LOT of subjective manipulation of the image, and these 5D3 implementations are all intended for stills shooters right now.

 

I don't know how the Kineraw was converted...the tester hasn't provided enough information to reproduce the test (e.g. lens, focal length and aperture for absolute starters). Much better I think to desaturate excess color information than to try to boost out color information that just isn't present. I know very little about Kineraw in general, can someone please test the rolling shutter? Is bad news embargoed until more bugs are worked out?

 

The BMC displays its candy stripe moire on the edges of the lens to the left of the dog, and rainbow noise all over the image. I'm not sure why that's given a pass and the 5D3 vertical lines aren't (though I hope that's an ML hack bug or some oddity in the debayering being used). The 5D3 has vastly shallower depth of field, which we can surmise the lens choice and setting did not account for the much larger sensor, throwing the dog out of focus. The 5D3 will give usable picture all the way up to ISO 12,800 (NR gets very useful there) but I recommend shooting the RAW at 3200 max and boosting in post as needed. I don't think the sensor has gain applied above 3200.

[shuibin]

I feel the Kineraw is the best!

[Jacek]

Can You explain:

 

- what is the color of the candle in reality? (kineraw's orange or other's pink)

- what is the color of the window blinds? (5D3's yellow or other's wooden)

 

- is it really half of the picture out of focus on 5D3 and kineraw or I'm too pixel peeper or it's just because of different fov? (on BMCC I see little more details: in the back - case pattern, in the middle - Carl Zeiss 2/35, in the front - silver lens numbers, Canon lens on the left)