OK. I fell into another Waskuwy Wabbit Hole. The hole is labeled "Fat Pixels."
The problem I was trying to solve is simple enough. When we were in Rome and wandering through a few of the Sainte Eglise's temples to Long Dead Popes my wife commented that I really needed a quieter camera. The Sony A6000's shutter has a distinctive "clack", even with the electronic front curtain enabled. Apparently I was disturbing the penitents who were having their confessions heard.
Seemed like a reasonable enough request to quiet things down. No one wants to wake the dead (as in Dead Popes Society) nor disrupt those confessing their maybe numerous sins. So I started the search for camera options that included as their Number One item zero shutter noise.
While considering Sony cameras with full electronic readout and, therefore, completely silent shutters, I stumbled on an unrelated article. I'd just learned that from the first iteration of the A7S Sony had blessed consumers with a Silent Shutter option, which is how I came upon the article in question. I'd just come across something called "Fat Pixels."
Voila! le Waskuwy Wabbit Hole.
One thing led to another and I was reading through various discussion groups and forums. "Get DPI" was the first thread on the topic. Style Over Substance added something to the subject. By the time I got to Open Photography Forum's thread, I was hooked. Hooked, I tell you.
"Fat Pixels" seemed to boil down to a "look" that depended on color accuracy and dynamic range. Maybe there was a hint of limit depth of field with wide apertures, too.
Digital Magic and Whole-cloth Nirvana seemed just a small camera purchase away. A sweet looking Sony A7S with low mechanical shutter mileage had come up on leboncoin. Who knew how many hours of video had been shot on the thing, but hopefully the resistors could still resist and the thing would remain reliable.
To buy or not to buy, that was the immediate question. There were a couple non-"Fat Pixel" things to consider.
If I went with the full frame A7S, the only Full Frame lenses I have are fixed focal length. They are truthfully glorious. No lie. But they aren't exactly flexible when traveling with family members and photographing things "on the fly". For the kind of work that sometimes require I let sleeping nuns sit nodding peacefully upright in the pew I've found a standard zoom to be wonderfully useful. All I need to do is mate this saintly lens (it's a wonderful Zeiss, afterall) to a Silent Shutter APS-C body. That would be perhaps the most straight-forward approach.
But... but... but!!!... the A7S promised something APS-C cameras and nearly all other Full Frame can't. "Fat Pixels!" That Heavenly Digital Paradise of Outragiously Fun Tweaky-ness that only True Afficionados and Members of the Brotherhood could appreciate.
Mulling this over for a couple days, it dawned on me there was something amiss. It was then the Skies Parted and Rays of Beatific Light fortunately shown down fully illuminating the subject in Truth.
The parting of the skies started with the realization the topic of "Fat Pixels" basically ended in 2013. Looking more critically I found a couple articles that clearly and cleanly called into question certain things around the topic. Digital Camera World may just have helped save me from myself and Eternal Damnation.
Looking at 2013 State of Affairs I can understand how some people could construct an intellectual argument that 9 micron sensor sites will capture more accurate image information than, say, a 5 micron or smaller sensor site. Makes sense, right? Kodak 16 and 20megapixel medium format, Nikon D700, and Sony A7S sensors all have approximately 9 micron photo sites. So they should have more color depth, color accuracy, and dynamic range than 24megapixel full frame sensors which have approximately 5 micron sites. Sounded like an easy argument to make.
Except it wasn't.
2013 was the year Sony introduced the first of their series of Full Frame sensor'd mirrorless cameras. The A7 an A7R hit the market and test sites like DxOMark could verify their performance. The A7S was introduced a year later and of course DxOMark tested it, too.
Do you notice something? From the first glance we can see that the A7R and A7 cameras rate higher than the A7S. Specifically, the A7R and A7 sensors give around 25 bits of color, where the A7S gives 24 bits. The "Fat Pixel" intellectual exercise was clearly in trouble. How is it that a 9 micron site sized sensor is out-performed by sensors with more and, importantly, smaller pixels? And how is it that the smaller site sized sensors return _more_ dynamic range than the 9 micron device?
Checking the medium format Phase One P40 performance against the A7 and A7R was also interesting. While giving equal color bit-depth between all three sensors, the Sony sensors return a full stop _more_ dynamic range than the larger 16bit per channel medium format Kodak CCD Phase One sensor.
Hmmmm... in terms of measurable real world performance the year 2013 seems to be a turning point. "Fat Pixel" conversations had pretty much come to an end. I confess that I find this most interesting. The assumed analog to digital advantage of large image sensor sites simply wasn't "there." For a silent shutter it makes more sense to find an A6300 or A6100 body.
Since I already use Sony A7 Full Frame mirrorless and if ultimate image quality were the goal there would be no image quality advantage moving to the A7S. In fact, the A7 sensor is still pretty darned good, even compared to current camera offerings that sport 10 years of sensor development over the devices I already have in hand. What's not to love about the original A7 14+ stops of dynamic range? What could be visibly better than 25 bits of color depth?
That's when another Waskuwy Wabbit Hole opened with an arrow pointing to even better image quality.
Before I fall into the new hole I should probably say something about the Dead Pope Society comment I made earlier. If you've ever been to Italy, and Rome in particular, you'll know that churches there are commonly used as internment sites for important church figures. I'm not sure why they aren't just buried outside in the ground like the rest of us, but here's a Bit O Truth I never expected to encounter. It all makes for some pretty good photography opportunities if you're into that sort of thing.
OK. The arrow is pointing to another Wabbit Hole. Onward...
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