I’m sure this has been discussed before on other websites that shall remain nameless, but I’m trying to improve the sharpness I’m seeing out of my M6ii. I know the 32mp sensor is hard on lenses, but I was expecting to see more sharpness than on my old M5 right off the bat. In many situations, it’s actually the opposite, although it is certainly capable of very sharp images. I’ve got incredibly sharp glad with the 32mm and Sigma 56mm and on the M5 it seemed like you could crop well into many images without losing any sharpness at the point of focus. That is definitely not what I’ve been experiencing with the M6ii though.
I’ve been careful not to compare images at 100% because that work would effectively be cropping further in on the 32mp sensor. The inconsistency leads me to believe it’s a combination of my technique abcs possibly some shutter shock (or so I’ve heard).
Has anyone else experienced this? Any tips to improve or tests to figure out what’s going on?
FYI- I don’t have the EVF but will be getting one soon. My wife wasn’t ready for another $150 soon after buying another camera. 😉
Just like, ‘in that other place’ a posted sample or two, is gold. My method of seeing the exif is to drag said files to the desktop and pop them open in FastStone. I use the added viewfinder (eBay purchase – second hand) probably more than 50% of the time, so a worthwhile addition for me. Otherwise, the camera is held close to my substantial waistline, rather than held out like a wet diaper for viewing the LCD. 😊
I haven’t thoroughly tested the camera yet but did not notice any drop in sharpness versus the M50 when using the same lenses. From many of our experts in that RIP website I heard shutter shock would not impact images taken with the primes you mentioned. So it may have to do with shooting without the third point of contact given by the viewfinder (I bought mine used and don’t regret, leave it on the camera most of the time).
Yeah, I wasn’t sure how to post images here yet, and didn’t really poke around looking for it either. 😇
I’ve got some examples on my camera but haven’t pulled them off yet. They were at my daughter’s orchestra concert, shot at 1/200 on the Sigma 56mm. I’ll post when I get a bit more time.
Hi all. It’s good to see so many familiar faces here!
I have some ideas for you, but agree with Filibuster that a couple of samples (with EXIF) would help us out a lot. Be easier to narrow things down that way.
Interesting monikor... you will always be R2 to me :).
Sharpness can depend on what type of image file format you shoot (JPG or RAW) and how the image is processed, as well as depending on other factors such as the lens, shutter speed, camera and subject movement, and so on. (Without going all Ken-Rockwell here, I get his point from his sharpness rants, but I do think lens sharpness counts and matters quite a lot.)
If shooting JPEG make sure to choose picture 'style' settings in the camera menu that emphasize sharper images, if that is what you are after.
In post processing I get lovely sharp images from my M6ii cameras with my entire set of lenses, even those that are on the less-sharp end of the sharpness spectrum. we have so many great lens choices between Canon and third party lenses. All the Sigma, Rokinon, and Laowa lenses I have in EF-M mount are quite sharp. Even the EF-M 15-45 kit lens is reasonably sharp (well, my sixth copy is!) It will definitely look sharper on a 24 MP body than the m6ii if pixel peeping).
While we are waiting for samples I just want to say how pleased I am that the previous 2 posters Larry & R2, whoops I mean Jekyllnhyde are becoming active here! I was sure hoping you both would. :)
Larry, this is the piece I need to understand better. I remember Chris Nicolls saying in the 90D review (same sensor as the M6II) that while you would not benefit from the extra resolution (versus the 24MP sensor), if the lenses were not able to resolve those extra details (like a L lens) the pictures wouldn’t look worse either.
Interesting thread!
I was a little bit disappointed in the beginning not to see a dramatic improvement when moving from M6 to M6 II.
However, as soon as I changed to prime lenses e.g. 56mm Siggy, the images reveal great levels of detail, possibly more than with the M-zooms.
I haven't tested that yet side by side...
Larry gave good mention (ref: JPEG) of diving into the menu options to set up the ‘Picture Style’. (Page 4 of the first chapter. Mine is set with a bit of personal fine tuning to the ‘Fine Detail’ option, and I can thank Marco Nero for that. (Is he here yet?) 😊
24 MP to 32 MP sounds like a large jump, but remember that is the 'total area' increase in two dimenions... the actual increase horizontally or vertically is only 16% more pixels (going from 6000 horizontal to 6960) --- so it's not a big change. Where you really notice the difference is when cropping (you have more to crop) and extreme perspective correction for straightening buildings and such for ultra-wides ---- the 32 MP gives you more latitude and cleaner results.
From my copies of the native EF-M lenses, I group them into rough 'tiers' of sharpness in a dpreview post, linked below. it's going to be hard not to refer back to that site, but after all this is dprevived so I guess it's OK to save this info. :)
"Tier 1: Astonishing. The Canon EF-M 32mm f1.4 lens. This lens gets its own tier. No other lens I've had matches its IQ. And it's almost as sharp wide open as stopped down.
Tier 2: Excellent: Canon 11-22. Very sharp at all focal lengths and apertures, just not quite as sharp as the 32
Tier 3: Very Good: Canon 55-200, 22mm f2, 28mm f3.5 macro. The 22mm gets sharpest at 2.8 or lower, but all lenses in this tier are slightly softer than my Canon 11-22
Tier 4: Good: Canon 18-55, 15-45, 18-150. The 15-45 is the sharpest in the center of the frame, but is softer at the corners, while the 18-55 is uniformly sharp across the frame and ends up being sharper in the corners than the 15-45. My 18-150 copy is slightly decentered and shows one or two soft corners wide open at the wide apertures, and overall is slightly less sharp than the 18-55 and 15-45 zooms. All 3 zooms in this tier are perfectly capable of making sharp, vibrant images at 4k monitor resolution with a little cropping, and work well for 4k video. Notably of the 3 zooms in this tier the 18-55 has the best build quality --- it's a well-built, solid lens.
As for the Rokinons and Sigmas, I believe they would mostly fall into Tier 2, definitely stopped down to f4 they're as sharp as the Canon 11-22. Wide open, the Sigma 16 and Rokinon 8mm might be more in the Tier 3 category."
I believe all lenses benefit in some way from the higher resolution sensor, if you are trying to get every ounce of sharpness out of a lens. Even some well known reviewers such as Chris and even Christopher Frost on Youtube who I really like, make blanket statements such as "only the 32mm f1.4 benefits from the M6ii's 32 MP sensor". I think that kind of rhetoric is over-reaching and comes more from trying to make brief statements that make them sound authoritative than from extensive real-world image processing, away from the world of simple resolution charts and technical lens reviews.
32 MP images contain more data for images taken through any lens, period. That's more information that can be processed and used in sharpening algorithms, and as post-processing software reaches new leaps and bounds it can recover surprising detail from what initially looks like muddy data. The more 'real' data it has to work with (even muddy data) the better the end result. I definitely get better results with the m6ii with virtually every lens I have, if I'm forced to crop and go as close to the pixel level as possible, and apply sharpening and de-noise, tone curves, etc.
What the reviewers may 'mean' in fact, is do most people really use or need near-pixel-level sharpness for most of what they do? And I'm the first to agree that in many situations we don't - so much resolution is often overkill for viewing on a 4k monitor.
I once shot with a vintage Vivitar 100-200mm telephoto lens that had fungus and low contast, and to boot, I underexposed a great scene with a train. The image was totally unrecoverable with Canon DPP4, just too noisy and unsharp. DxO PhotoLab 5 did amazing things ---- its RAW image processing is excellent, definitely recovering more pixel-level detail than DPP, or darktable which I also tried, and I was able to punch up the exposure and sharpness and get a really nice result from the image using DxO/Deep Prime.
the 11-22 is a special lens and was the reason i got into the M system with a M mki then Mmkii and the M5...i still have not replaced the 11-22 now i have an R6...it was a sad day when i realized there was not going to be a M5mkii about 3 years ago
I am (or was, lol) a hobbyist photographer on a budget. As such the 11-22 was my reason to get into M as well, after I saw the price of Sony’s 10-18 I wanted to buy for my A6000 to shoot landscapes. And then I discovered the other Canon goodies like the tiny 22, the $125 nifty fifty I could adapt to my M50, the refurb store with plenty of items, and on and on…until I got my M6II last November and, thought, that’s it, I finally found my other half. No more gear lusting, GAS is cured!
Hi.
After brief comparison of my new phone camera (200mpx 1/1.22") and M6, I was like WTF? The phone camera shot looked much better. But....
.... More below.
Here is what I got, although I did not do thorough investigation.
1) The shutter shock seems to be real. Comparing two images, one shot with mechanical shutter, and one with electronic shutter, it looks like the one sharper is the one shot with electronic shutter.
2)Image review on device display gives me vastly different results. It looks much better on phone screen than on the camera screen. Maybe display resolution has something to do with it. So comparing on the same medium is healthy practise.
3) Canon sharpening is really really bad, for pixel peepers anyways. Other image development programs do much better job at sharpening. I have real issue with that, and so I commited myself back into the protography and subscribed to Adobe LR. The output is obviously better, and compared to Canon in-camera output and Canon DPP, it is like night and day for me. No large radius halo plagued mushy mess.
4) shooting conditions. If one is pixel peeping, more sterile test scenario has to be put in place. Or more samples. It might be unfair to compare very random shots.
I hope other users will be more active in this, and we find a resolution.
Alright, I’m back! Sorry for the delay everyone, it’s been an extremely busy couple of days!
Here’s my sample picture. Taken with the Sigma 56mm at 1/160s, f/1.4 and ISO 320.
In the past, I’ve been able to take pictures like this and crop in a decent amount - maybe ~20% or so - to where it’s clear where my kid is in the group. But cropping in here I find it to look less sharp much quicker than I’m used to.
