DPreview (Click here) just posted an extended Sony RX1 preview that includes RAW and JPEG image samples. And you really have to check out the Studio Comparison tool (Click here). There is not major RAW quality difference between the various FF cameras like the Nikon D600, A99 and Canon 5DmarkIII. But in JPEG the RX1 seems to be better than the D600 and A99 cameras and as good as the Canon 5DmarkIII.
What do you think?
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Some “Asian” RX1 cameras are shipping worldwide from eBay (here on Slidoo eBay). Shipment in Europe and US will start in 2-3 weeks.
RX1 price and in Stock checks (Click on store name):
Amazon, Adorama, BHphoto, Wex UK ,Wex Germany, Sonystore DE–UK–FR–IT–ES–NL–SE–FI–CH and more links at Alphacameradeals.
46 Responses
I think it’s an amazing camera which needs a quality WA adapter. Next year, may be?
The Canon wins hands down. These “tests” are a joke for a photographer but so amusing to annoy nerds 🙂
You do know that the picture is actually BELOW the camera name, right? So the picture that you say wins hands down (top left picture) is actually from the RX1, not the Canon.
FAIL
hahaha
poor Canon guys
Haha, RX1 looks amazing.
Also the 24Mpix pictures should be resized to 22Mpix, then RX1 would beat the 5D Mk.III with bigger margin (subjektively), as the latter has the slightly “zoomed out” effect due to less Mpix.
this guy is having buyers regret from buying the 5d mkiii right about now lol 🙂
I love you nerds, keep it coming. And you are also blind.
It is interesting to compare the NEX-7 as well.
NEX7 looks much sharper/crisper/more contrasty in the center than the RX1 at low ISO. RX1 is bit better in the corners however (in uncorrected RAW)
High ISO is clearly better on the RX1 of course.
JPEGs however surprisingly look better on the the NEX-7 up to ISO 800. Sharper and crisper imho.
WHat I don’t know is: was the NEX-7 tested with the Zeiss 24 1.8 or the Kit Zoom?
I think taht it has been tested with the DT F1.8 50mm SAM lens. Try to click the little wheel in the right bottom corner under the picture.
Yep, I compared against the NEX-7 also. Makes me feel better about my investment. If I can shoot everything as ISO 100/200 then I won’t need to buy an RX1 right? ;o)
Think I will wait for the RX2 with built in EVF and articulated screen. :o)
Same thought here. Unless you don’t really need the high-ISO-Quality above ISO 1600 the RX1 does not have any advantage above the NEX7 + 24mm Zeiss. And the NEX has the EVF. I will keep my NEX7 until it is dead 🙂
So will I.
“..as good as the Canon 5DmarkIII..” You’re kidding me right? Coz RX-1 looks completely better.
The RX-1 sample is a bit soft, but look at the red colored area… RX-1 sample shows less artifacts.
True.
Surprisingly (or not) on base ISO it seems like A99 retains more detail then D600 or RX1. (similar thing was with A77 vs D3200 where Sony got more preserved more detail in RAWs then Nikon – guess that’s the price you pay for optimizing sensor for high ISOs. I tried to compare it with A77, but there’s no way – A77 is focused on completely different point then any of 135s).
BTW: Check the corners. Seems like Zeiss made really superb job with this lens.
In this picture we just see the D600 has the worst jpg. The other three could easily be a draw match.
open dPreview. They got comparison of developed RAWs.
And the fact that Nikon got worse JPG then Sony is extremely surprising, to say at least.
The focus plane in the photos is different. Go to the comparison chart on the DPreview forum and place selection on the money clips. Lets hope you say the same thing. Where the admin has selected, it is where the RX is the sharpest because that is where it is focused. But the clips the balls and the roles in the box are sharp and better on the D600.
Not everything seems to be in focus in the RX1s shot. Center and upper right and left corners are way better in the RX1 than all the others but area at the bottom are unsharp, so better compare the center to compare high-ISO.
Noise is in my opinion always better or at least equal to the others. The Fuji only goes up to ISO 6400, don’t forget that if you select higher ISO.
But anyone who really says he would buy a D600 or 5D (a lot of nerds in the comments of dpreview do) has not understood anything of this little RX1 at all.
Only critics I have by the way is still the missing EVF.
maybe your right, I thought the center would be better just because of the greater depth of field due to the 35mm (vs. the 50mm on the d600) but maybe it is still to shallow for the whole scene.
I don’t care about jpgs! in raw, the d600 looks much better (noise not much difference, maybe a little advantage to the nikon, but nothing even remotely significant) but the lens is so much better (except in the center) look at the watch huge difference. don’t know how much can be compensated for with sharpening but for the price of the rx1 I would expect more.
of course this is only if the test is really representative. which I hope it is not (the lens might be much better at greater distances, or maybe it is a bad sample or whatever) I really want this camera to be excellent.
I am a Canon shooter but to me the RX1 is the best but not by much. The real looser here though is the Nikon D600. In reality the Rx1 is just a very different class of camera to a DSLR i.e it has many advantages over a DSLR and some limitations compared to a DSLR. I suspect it will not be bought as an alternative to a DSLR kit but rather in addition to a DSLR kit. On the other hand if it performs as good as it is shaping up to do it would really suit my shooting style and I think the DSLR would gather dust in my cupboard
Again for street shooting the RX1 will have a problem of focus hunting particularly in any light light other than bright day light. You have to read the whole article. Admin here is selectively publishing info here. Go there and read the whole thing. Again if you want to know about the comparisons between different cameras, go there. It is free and you can go through the whole frame just to have a better sense of the comparisons. If you want to compare noise, you have to check the darker shades because the problem is. You can start comparing the grey ramp and move towards the darker shades and free to come back and make more informed comments
It really does not matter much, am sure if your a pro you clients wont be pixel peeping. Anyone of these cameras would rock unless you get a d600 with the dust/oil problem.
We knew enough about the sensor. Results are as expected.
The RX1 is a good street shooter camera under dim conditions.
Now add an integrated EVF, a tilt screen and a wheel for fotographers, and the RX2 is probably a very good camera for this kind of work.
DPreview reports of under performing focus under dim conditions. That is not good for street shooting
Agreed.
Depends how bad AF really is.
OTOH, trashing a lot of shots in street shooting is common business.
A99 looks better to me in most areas and I seriously doubt they’re using the sharpest glass available for the test.
My foot is placed squarely in my mouth as I find they used the 85mm f/1.4 ZA lens. Now I feel bad for the 35mm f/2.
Has anyone actually read the review? Look at raw comparison. There is no difference between those 4 cameras.
Any rumors on a Cybershot with a built in EVF?
nope
All of this is really pointless. Looking at 20+ MPx images at 100% is like staring at a mural from an inch away. Pixel peeping is dead.
I agree. Stop pixel peeping as prints are the final output. We have shot one of our recent weddings with the new A99 and it performed flawlessly. This is expected due to the class of camera it is in. Unless you are shooting an event with several different camera brands, your client sees the output from one. I can attest that the A99 clearly matches the Canon 5D MKiii because we own that camera as well. Where it outshines is dynamic range for the same given scene. I can’t speak about jpegs because I never shoot them, but raw images are excellent. I think no matter what Sony releases, some will complain for the sake of complaining. In that case, move on to what you perceive as the next best thing. For those of us that shoot Sony it’s a great addition for us.
Guys,
the photo shown in this post is comparing JPG output at ISO 6400.
For a real comparison of the cameras’ sensor output please select RAW, not JPG.
Once you do that, you would see that the RX1 is not very good when compared with those mighty Full-frame cameras from Nikon and Canon.
The RX1’s output is soft, and blacks are not really black.
The benchmark (IQ king) camera to compare against is the Nikon D4.
By the way, I’m still waiting for DPreview the add the Canon 1D-X to this comparison, as I hear that too is an IQ king.
Up against the Nikon D4, the RX1 looks like a p&s toy. But sadly, so does everything else.
I think when it comes to hi-end sensors comparision becomes difficult because the bottleneck is not the camera but the quality and exact adjusting of the lens.
I always shoot RAW, so I don’t care much for jpg. However Canon 5mkIII and Fuiji X perform better than RX1 in jpg. Nikon’s jpg always was poor….
In RAW I think the RX1 performs surprisingly weak at high ISO including sharpness. Competition is sharper + has less (croma) noise. Strange thing, how excellent is the lens really?
At that price level I expected the RX1 to perform better so I am a bit disappointed.
(I own a Nikon and a Sony, use both a lot.)
The RX1 seems to be overstating its ISO, even more than most cameras — look how much darker it is in the (manually exposed) comparisons. When you normalise the RAWs for brightness it’s looking a little weaker. I thought Steve Huff’s high ISO samples were suspicious…
It seems a nice camera that will be perfect for a lot of users/uses. But with average noise, no OSS, and a f/2 lens it’s not the compact low light miracle I was idly daydreaming about.
The small crops of the coins in this whatsoever-doing-webthing are slightely disapointing (conc. the RX1)… but if I download the whole RAW-Files and compare them myself I have to say: I’m really happy about my RX1-Pre-Order 🙂
I’m surprised in how well the Canon 5DIII looks an ISA3200
I selected a dark spot on the Baileys bottle at the embossed glass logo close to center of the frame to see how well a very dark sky would look at ISO 3200
In my opinion the Sony RX1 is better at ISO3200 than the others but a little soft, the next is the Canon 5D with just a little more color noise than the RX1 but sharper. The Nikon D600 shot looks to be just a little brighter with maybe more noise and less sharpness than the Canon.
And then there is the a99 with I believe having the most color noise at the selected location on the Baileys bottle glass logo and with what looks like less sharpness than the Canon 5D and the Nikon D600
One last note: some of the tests used older and or beta versions of ACR and that variation could make some difference.
And all of them better at these ISO 3200 tests than my a850/a900
I personally use ISA 3200 often for available light indoors and for very late afternoon and night available light street photography and process the keepers with ACR to control noise.
I guess the real pixel peeper thing to do would be to download all the raws, get them into Lightroom, equalize the black/grey/white levels, and spit them all out again at a common size. I did that a while ago for assorted FF DSLRs, and concluded that… …they were close enough to make sensors a secondary factor. I would choose based on handling, AF, IBIS, available lenses etc rather than sensor performance.
..
I’ve always liked in museums and galleries, sometimes with moving subjects (so anti-shake doesn’t help). My dream machine has a f/2.8 standard zoom and the sort of sensor we’re seeing from full frame these days. Such cameras exist (from 3 manufacturers), they’re just too big and heavy and they anger/alarm/intimidate subjects. So I’m giving some thought to living with a certain 35/2 fixed prime…
Look how good is old Sony A900 in RAW modes up to ISO3200. It has much better colours than any of newer cameras – black is black, red is red, blue is blue, green is green. Color checker is in top right part of the image. A900 simply beats all new cameras.
For me, all newer stuff is simply useless because of this – they have maybe a bit more detail here and there at highest ISO, but colourwise they are very poor. Take a comparison tool, choose ISO 1600 or ISO 3200 and look at Mickey Mouse pants that should be red, but only A900 shows it red, new Sony FF cameras show it purple, D600… well better not to talk about it…
Agreed!
I see nothing on the mid full-frame market, not the Nikon 800E or the Canon 5D or even the Sony a99 that looks to image that much better than the four year old a900 in any of the ISO’s that really matter to me.
Looks like I can save my money to spend on some quality lens replacements till the next full-frame interchangeable lens body hit the market. 🙂
You are right, JiM! You’re damn right. Your post should be printed on the walls.
Better on jpeg???? Wow, what an achievement. At least a 3000¢ cameras which makes nice jpegs. This is what the world has waited for. No wonder they are rated junk bonds. But wait, they are just about to deliver that new, super cam everybody is waiting for. And in only 5 to 6 years they will have the lenses then too. But then Canikon will be really scared.
Wow, Sony must be doing something right given the amazing amount of mostly uninformed and petty anti-Sony venom being directed towards the RX1. Why bother?
Having had a very close look at dozens of raw files from the RX1 over the past ten days and compared them with like or identical raw files from cameras ranging from the D800 to the XPro, X100, D600, Leica M9 – I’m more than satisfied that the RX1 goes up well against all comers and some pretty tough optical competition.
All cameras have strengths; the RX1 has a bunch. It isn’t a replacement for a DSLR, but neither is a DSLR a replacement for the RX1 in some hands.
Six months from now when the camera is in the hands of talented photographers all over the world some of the comments in this post are going to look quite ridiculous. They already do in my eyes.