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Comment by ekianjo | Hacker News Reader

Here's a sample picture at full resolution (100M pixels):

https://1.img-dpreview.com/files/p/sample_galleries/60445538...

The amount of details is impressive.

I agree with the other replies that mention the image softness with 100MP sensors, and how hard it can be to achieve image crispness.

That said, I think they are missing the point. This is a 100MP medium-format camera for $US10k. This is markedly cheaper than comparable cameras from other medium format manufacturers. The big question is how the GFX 100 stacks up to the competition in other areas.

I don't quite understand what I see: it doesn't look like lens blur. It's more like the bad JPEGs from my Fuji S5600. But why would dpreview not do a proper raw conversion?

It's a pre-production camera. Typically reviewers don't get to see anything but JPEGs until it's released.

The image is soft, probably out of focus. Large megapixel sensors tend to accentuate small focus errors, which is one of their downsides (another are the huge raw file sizes). With 100MP, you have to make extra sure your focus is spot on, and perhaps use a tripod.

If you look at the fine details, everything is soft. Not one single line in the whole photo looks crisp and sharp.

This is not an issue with the camera, mind you — just a fact of life when taking photos at this sort of range — but it does highlight why you don't get nearly as much of a benefit from that 100MP sensor versus their 50MP medium format cameras as you'd think you do.

This is undoubtedly a brilliant studio camera for applications like fashion or product photography, but completely and utterly pointless as a landscape camera, where physics severely limits the benefits you're getting for the extra price.

> If you look at the fine details, everything is soft. Not one single line in the whole photo looks crisp and sharp.

This is generally true with color digital cameras that use color filter arrays, which is most digital cameras. I have yet to see a camera with a color filter array which looks "sharp" at 1:1 pixels.

To me the detail looks quite acceptable, but I'm not directly comparing it against other photos so I might be wrong.

> I have yet to see a camera with a color filter array which looks "sharp" at 1:1 pixels.

Check out Foveon sensors in Sigma cameras. They are really impressive.

agreed, every pixel from the 3-layer foveon images is great, they have a very unique look

they dont have a color filter array. They have three distinct color sensors, very different tech from usual cameras.

> To me the detail looks quite acceptable, but I'm not directly comparing it against other photos so I might be wrong.

Oh, absolutely — the detail is pretty good. My point is simply that "pretty good" is the best you can achieve in this situation, because the limiting factor for the amount of detail is distance and atmospheric conditions, not the sensor — but that, in turn, shows that the step up from 50 to 100MP is not that useful, rather than showing off the advantages of the 100MP sensor.

I’m not sure what is expected, because it’s only a 40% difference in resolution.

That's not inconsiderable.

I use both a FF and a 1.5x crop APS-C camera, and part of the reason I got the APS-C body at all is because I get 24MP from that instead of roughly 11 for the equivalent crop from my FF body when I go birding.

Interesting problem to have. I assume you already have the longest possible focal length lens for your camera system?

Pretty much, yeah. I'm using the a7iii and the a6400 with the 100-400 GM. Only way to reach any longer on all-sony is by adding a teleconverter to the mix. At any rate, it's fairly common advice to use e.g. a 7D mk2 for wildlife even if you're mostly a 5D user.

Any reason you don't go for the 1.4X or 2X teleconverter? Would the loss in shutter speed make it a wash for birds, where I assume that actually matters a lot for birds in flight?

I still have the option to grab the TC at some point and potentially use both the a6400 and the TC in tandem (though I doubt the lens is quite sharp enough to justify that — odds are the 100-400 + 1.4x already has a circle of confusion bigger than the pixel sites on the APS-C sensor)

The reasons I went with the APS-C body instead of the TC is that I actively wanted a second body for other reasons. Namely: I wanted a smaller, lighter body that I'm happy to just leave in my backpack all the time, and I wanted the versatility of having two lenses available at all times for some situations.

Also, not the most amazing photo ever, but definitely a good example of the sort of sharpness you can get out of this — https://i.imgur.com/p9H42aG.jpg

> I have yet to see a camera with a color filter array which looks "sharp" at 1:1 pixels

This is why I was absolutely blown away when I got my first high-DPI screen: a MBP in 2013.

At the time I was a pro photographer. Because the pixels were half the size as before, a true 1:1 viewing looked so much sharper. I found I could tune my sharpening (almost always required) for print based on screen viewing alone, and no longer had to run as many test prints.

In addition, in the grid/filmstrip views of photos I could set the thumbnails to just slightly bigger than the old 35mm slides, and found I could quickly edit down my photos often just based on that alone.

Excuse the rant... for some reason it triggered a moment of nostalgia about how amazed I was with that screen.

And it's a JPEG. It would be interesting to see the RAW image.

I agree as is the dynamic range in the shadow areas of the image. You can see a few people in heavily shadowed areas as well as detail on white buildings that otherwise would be blown out.

Meh, there's terrible smearing of details in the leaves, grass, and stone due to clumsy noise reduction. It will be interesting to see what a decent raw converter can do with files from the camera.

Not a fair evaluation - in a standard resolution picture, say 24MP, with the same FOV, that grass patch would be a green blob.

Yeah but you could buy a 24MP camera and a whole kit of high quality glass for the same price as this body.

And that's enough for most people. MF cameras have a specific set of uses and some trade-offs.

What you're seeing is the physical limits of resolving detail through thousands of feet of warm air. There's probably no need for any noise reduction in these conditions.

True. The closer shots sadly also have a plastic look from noise reduction. I'm sure that a decent raw converter will get much better results out of the files.

People here talking about image quality should be aware of this being a jpeg. I'd say most problems discussed are jpeg issues. You can't discuss image quality over a lossy codec.

How so? JPEG compression is orthogonal to resolution. At the macroblock (or per pixel) level, a 100MP image is not degraded more than a 0.3MP image. So if softness can be seen in a 24MP jpg, it should also be discernible in a 100MP jpg.

Correct, but with a higher resolution image there's more incentive to use higher compression (lower quality) to bring the file size down.

Indeed. Even 1/8 crop images of that photo look great.

As for some of the negative comments, pixel peepers are a bane to the camera industry. Fact is, there's always a limit to the amount of detail that can go through the lens itself. Our eyes only see so much. This is why MF doesn't matter for most people. Even FF is too much for the average person. Our eyes can't resolve more than 4k at most distances, so that allows a lot of cropping even at 16mp. MF is for blown up studio or landscape images. Zooming in on a 100mp image taken at a long distance in the first place searching for flaws is entirely missing the point.

Tldr: this camera and the image are fantastic, pixel peeping is silly.

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