Sony’s DSC-P93 sucks
20 Oct 2005UPDATE: Maybe I was wrong. See the bottom of this article for more.
The sensor on this must be an absolute piece of trash. It hasn’t even got the excuse of a slowly dying sensor due to a manufacturing defect/humidity… it’s just really poor quality.
The above image has just been scaled, and carefully compressed so as not to exacerbate the problem (in actual fact, JPEG compression artifacts reduce the severity of it). It looks as though it’s had a posterize filter applied to it (reducing the number of colours in the palette, similar to what indexed GIF photos look like), but it hasn’t. That’s straight out of the camera… so far as I can tell, no other software has touched it.
Maybe it just looks worse to me than it is because I’ve got three sets of images here, the other two of which come from a Canon EOS-300D — or Digital Rebel in US-speak — (or maybe a pair of them, judging from time delay between shots, but last I heard they were junky consumer versions of the EOS-10D with plastic casing, and “special” lens options, so why anyone would buy two of them is beyond me). I don’t know, I was just pretty appalled this was coming straight of a camera — ANY camera, regardless as to the brand. It’s not overexposed, or blurred, or grainy (well, it is, but you can’t see it particularly well in the scaled version and that’s not what I’m complaining about — I understand low-light does that to photos), it’s just really bad colour. Incidentally, it was shot as a JPEG. So, it’s not like I or anyone else has screwed up RAW processing — the camera has done that for us.
Oh, and incidentally, what’s with 3:2 ratios? I think it’s nicer than 4:3, but it bugged me to look shots from the Canon before I figured out what was going on!
Update: Perhaps they have been processed a little. One or two of the Rebel’s photos are exhibiting similar qualities, so that leads me to believe someone was being a tool with saturation in Photoshop or the like. And unhelpfully left the EXIF data intact so I thought it was unchanged. :-( I guess I’m often guilty of much the same thing with the GIMP, but oh well. Doesn’t hurt to be wrong once in a while!
