Sigma SD-14

Nikon D40 (2006) / Sigma SD-14 (2007)

I made a comparison with my last acquisition, the magnificent Sigma SD-14 from 2007
Comparison with another camera from the same era, the Nikon D40 of 2006
Already more than 15 years!

Nikon D40 (2006) / Sigma SD-14 (2007) by Marc Aubry, sur Flickr

Just here : www.flickr.com/photos/maoby/albums/72177720308286281

Nikon D40 (2006)
APS-C CCD sensor (23.7 x 15.5 mm) of 6 MP (3008 x 2000)
Price: $500.00 USD
Photos taken with the AF-S 35mm f/1.8 G DX nikkor
AF-S 50mm f/1.8 G Nikkor and AF-S 85mm f/1.8 G Nikkor
(multiplication factor of 1.5)
200-1600 (3200) ISO

      __________________

Sigma SD14 (2007)
4.6 MP Foveon APS-C sensor (2652 x 1768)
Price: $1,580.00 USD
Photos taken with the Sigma 24-105mm F4 DG OS HSM Art
(with a multiplication factor of 1.7)
100-800 (1600) ISO

Nikon D40 (2006) 50% / Sigma SD-14 (2007) 50% by Marc Aubry, sur Flickr

Nikon D40 (2006) 50% / Sigma SD-14 (2007) 60% Prorata by Marc Aubry, sur Flickr

For more …

Your remarks are welcome!

Excellent as always, Marc!

I bought my first SD14 as a replacement for a Nikon D50 (same sensor/quality as the D40) ... I already had an SD9 for close-up watch photography.

So back then the SD14 was intended for general JPEG shooting i.e. family, building work-in-progress, flora and fauna, etc.

Sad to say, it's OOC JPEGs were awful - nowhere near the quality out of the Nikon - so I sold it pretty quick.

My later SD14s were no better so I shot them raw, often with custom WB.

Overall, Sigmas are quite difficult to control. It takes a lot of patience and perseverance. 😇

Maoby, the Sigma 15 is, in my experience, an easy camera to use, with excellent color results with far, far less fiddling around with color than the SD14. It's really the perfect update of the SD14, but the timing of its release meant that it was overshadowed by the first Merrill-sensor cameras. The only 'weakness' of the SD15 IMHO is that its resolution via MP count is less than the Merrill cameras.
I used my SD15 last summer and started a new SD15 album on flickr. It does reds beautifully.
Sandy Fleischmann on flickr
Added SD15 photo on Flickr
SDIM3313 Sigma SD15 Vienna VA by Sandy Fleischmann, on Flickr

I find Sigma cameras to be perfect for fall photography. 😊

I have three Sigma cameras. I don't find them difficult to control. Maybe experience of using film helps ?

Don

I also have three Sigma. I find Sigma PhotoPro6 particularly unpleasant to use and so slow. 😫

The sdQH and the fp can save DNG files, which are easy to process in Adobe Camera Raw.
The DP3M will only save X3F files, which admittedly take longer to convert to TIFs -- about a minute each on my desktop PC. I can live with that.

Yes, I had made several comparisons between DNG and X3F with the Sigma sd Quattro H

If anyone is interested: www.flickr.com/photos/maoby/albums/72157709784530067

Interesting landscape comparisons. I personally preferred the X3F instead of the DNG, without first noticing which was which. The DNG seems much more yellow on the highlights. Granted I'm just looking at them now on a cellphone. I'll look later on the computer.

FWIW what I usually find myself needing to 'correct' in many Sigma files is too yellowish a tone. Usually I balance with a bit more on the magenta side.

Usually I find my SDQuattro less yellow than the Merrill cameras and those less yellow than the SD14 (out of camera without much adjustment, without processing etc) Just a generality.
The more recent versions of SPP are 'better' in color than earlier in my opinion. Better= truer and easier to adjust.

I never bought or used a Quattro, so I stayed with PhotoPro 5.5.3. which is speedy enough on my current machine.

However, I bought a Merrill back when I had a single-core 32-bit Hewlet-Packard with Windows XP ... SPP5 was pathetic on that machine. I also hated the stupid new trick of it loading the embedded JPEG instead of the raw for initial viewing - so that, to do anything technical, one had to poke a button to actually load the raw data for further work.

I sold that Merrill DP2 about a week or two later, SPP was that bad. These days, I only have the SD9 and SPP 3.5.2 is just right for that camera and FastStone Viewer is perfect for culling ...

If the image looks too yellow, I would have thought that you want more blue rather than more Magenta.

true, perhaps I misspoke (mis-wrote?) for yellow specifically. But I do find that many of my Merrill photos do need a touch more magenta (thinking of the Hawaii 2018 beach series I recently, finally, completed) I tend to gravitate to the lower right block of the color square in SPP6.8.2 or 6.8.3. I just looked at several of my recent spring 2023 landscape photos too. For example SDIM419 which is online, I processed the colorwheel/colorsquare to G0 A4 M7 B0

Personally, I always have the nagging feeling that a carefully adjusted image that looks right on my current monitor may look wrong on somebody else's. But it's no use fretting over it.

Don

And when we realize that our own brain is constantly lying to us about color perception, among other things! 😱

I don't think the brain is lying about colour. It is telling you what colour each patch of the scene is as compared with the average of those parts of the scene that have recently been on the fovea. As we are constantly doing eye movements, we get a good sampling of the scene over roughly 15 seconds.

Don

See some examples among many others

www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKfS37IvIYY
www.youtube.com/watch?v=hEYbugJsIcU
www.youtube.com/shorts/fR6QaQhN0S8
www.youtube.com/shorts/QEKQVV371EU
www.youtube.com/watch?v=AskAQwOBvhc
www.youtube.com/watch?v=kCr7rcf7riU

Just for fun ;)
www.youtube.com/watch?v=7iSZ4rPycS0

Discussion of "color" in fora tends to skim over the surface of the subject of Color Appearance, for example, per CIECAM02:

rawpedia.rawtherapee.com/CIECAM02#Example_2_-_Chromatic_adaptation

Yellow gets a mention there in an example:

I am not recommending that we should immediately download RawTherapee and use CIECAM02 but simply suggesting that adjusting the SPP color square/circle may not always be technically correct ...

Nikon D40 (2006) / Sigma SD-14 (2007) by Marc Aubry, sur Flickr

Game Over www.flickr.com/photos/maoby/albums/72177720308286281/with/52899273662/

😱