Camera Blog

This is part 1 of a review of the much-anticipated Sigma DP2 compact camera that was released in May, 2009.

This review does not contain:

• Modulation Transfer Function (MTF) charts
• Pixel-peeping full-resolution analysis of the pictures that the camera produces
• Side-by-side comparisons with other cameras in its class
• Features that many photographers will never give a second thought, such as Picture Styles
• A lengthy discussion on whether this is a 4.6MP or 14MP camera

Instead, this review will go into great detail on the reasons why this camera succeeds as a high-end compact and why it fails as a high-end compact. I hope to make it clear in both broad strokes and in great detail why this camera is: revolutionary, a hopeful sign of things to come, a success, and a big steaming pile of compromises. Please do not expect a “x/10″ rating at the end of this review; if that’s what you’re looking for then please point your browser to DPReview.com and hit the Refresh button until their review is posted.

I will likely make some generalizations that you will disagree with, and I will likely make some conclusions that you would not necessarily come to yourself. That’s ok– please leave a comment linking to your review of the DP2 on your own site if you choose to show me the error of my ways.

This review will be split into 2 parts, for a few reasons. I took possession of my DP2 on Tuesday, May 25th, 2009 and I will be leaving for a 10 day trip to Ireland on Saturday the 30th. I plan on spending the 5 days before my trip reviewing the basics of the camera and gathering initial impressions, and after I return I will do a follow-up with my longer-term impressions of its day-to-day use.

About me:

I think that it is important for the readers to know where I am coming from with this review. I am currently an advanced amateur photographer who occasionally makes money off of his pictures. I have done some commercial work, some photojournalism work, plenty of freelance spec work, and a ton of recreational work, all with varying degrees of success. I have high standards for my gear although I am aware that there is a point where better equipment will not necessarily lead to better photographs; I like to have a nice balance where my equipment isn’t holding me back and at the same time is not drastically more than I need.

My primary camera is a Canon 40D with the battery pack/grip, and I most often shoot with the Canon EF-S 17-55mm f/2.8 IS lens. The battery grip was added primarily for its ergonomics; I have large hands and the added surface area is greatly beneficial to me even while holding the camera in a landscape orientation. I don’t mind the weight or size of a large dSLR but I do often wish that I had a small camera that was able to meet the high standards of a dSLR’s images that I could put in a pocket and have with me at all times.

I have high standards for my equipment, but I do recognize the limitations that are imposed by my own budgets and by today’s technology.

Photography, to me, is about taking plenty of pictures and finding a very small handful to share. I don’t shoot nearly as much as many photographers, but out of 300 shots over a casual weekend I will ideally have 5 to 10 that I will share. Any tool that lets me get 1, 2, or 3 more fantastic shots is appealing to me.

Part 1: What it is

So, with all of that in mind let’s get this review started. I won’t delve into every specification of the camera (again, see DPReview.com and Sigma’s site for those details), so here are some highlights:

• It’s pretty small, like most compact cameras
• It’s pretty lightweight, like most compact cameras
• It has a gigantic sensor, unlike every other compact camera save for its predecessor: the DP-1
• It has a fixed 41mm-equivalent f/2.8 prime lens
• It does not have a built-in optical viewfinder, although there is a very expensive external hot-shoe viewfinder that can be purchased separately
• It uses Sigma’s Foveon X3 sensor rather than a traditional Bayer sensor
• It can record both RAW files and .jpgs
• It records 4.6 or 14 megapixel images, depending on who you ask

The goal of this camera is to provide dSLR-quality images from a compact body, while taking advantage of the unique properties of the Foveon sensor.

In a nutshell: tiny high-resolution sensors with tiny zoom lenses are generally inferior to larger sensors with less-compromised lens designs. Sigma’s engineers clearly understand this relationship and the DP2 is what emerged from their labs as their most recent attempt at a solution.

It has a 41mm-equivalent f/2.8 non-zooming lens (a.k.a. a “prime” lens, which in general produces a finer image than an equivalent zoom lens) with a relatively large 286mm^2 Foveon sensor, both contained in a camera body no bigger than many of today’s traditional p&s cameras. The DP2 uses a retrofocus lens rather than a Gauss or Tessar design; I don’t have a degree in optical physics so I’ll refrain from trying to explain the pros and cons of each of those.

Part 2: The Unboxing

The box contains:

• The Sigma DP2
• BP-31 Rechargeable Lithium-ion Battery
• BC-31 Battery Charger
• USB Cable
• A/V Cable that you’ll probably never use
• Lens Cap
• Neck Strap
• Soft pouch
• Sigma PhotoPro Software CD
• Instruction Manual

My absolute first impression of the camera: It feels as though the controls on the top of the camera were designed by a completely different team than those on the back of the camera. The mode dial, pop-up flash, and focus adjustment wheel all feel tight and solid, but the black-on-black buttons on the back feel really cheap for such an expensive camera.

The camera feels nice in hand, but honestly it doesn’t feel quite as solid as a cheaper Panasonic Lumix p&s that I have. This is really inexcusable if you ask me. A camera like this should feel as well-built as cameras that cost half as much, and should probably have some decent weather sealing too.

The rest of the accessories are what you’d expect– pretty normal camera stuff, a decent instruction manual, etc. I would prefer an integrated lens-cap system to the included cap that I’ll probably lose next week; it’s also not the greatest quality and it doesn’t appear as though much thought was put into it.

The DP2 feels very similar to the DP1, which I have had a chance to handle on occasion. It’s too big to fit in a back pocket but it’s smaller than any tiny dSLR. I feel a little silly using the included neck strap with this thing, and I’ll probably be swapping it out for a wrist strap instead.

Part 3: A closer look

In-hand feel & general handling:

Like I said above the build quality isn’t fantastic, but it’s not terrible either. The camera’s size feels nice in my hands, although a little more topographic relief around the thumb and finger areas would definitely be an improvement in the handling department.

The buttons are laid out very well and my first impression is that the designers did a great job in making the most important adjustments easy to use. There’s no need to dive into any menus to change the exposure settings, and a nice “Quick Settings” button provides fast access to ISO, metering, and drive settings. Focus point selection is also just a single button-press away.

The dials move crisply and smartly and the shutter release button has a decent but ever-so-slightly mushy feel. The half-press is tangible but it could use a little more definition.

Overall the controls feel decent, although if every button and dial on the camera had the same crispness as the main Settings wheel on top of the camera we might– might– hear comparisons to Leica. Maybe.

The LCD:

I’ll be frank: The LCD kinda sucks. It looks like it was pulled out of a parts bin for a 3-year old camera. I was hoping for something along the lines of, oh I dunno… a modern high-end compact, but I guess that isn’t the case. I don’t use the LCD for much more than composition and a quick focus-check most of the time, and I rely on the histogram (there is a live histogram feature on the DP2) for exposure. Still though, it’s obvious where they were cutting corners…

The Menu System:

I like to think that I’m fairly proficient when it comes to today’s technology; I’m 28 and I have been lucky enough to grow up during a time of rapid technological progression, and I have seen all manner of computers, phones, gadgets, and cameras evolve from relatively early models into today’s New Hotness. I have even dabbled in computer programming and I have created a handful of programs websites from scratch, so I have some understanding of what goes into creating a human-facing interface.

Because of that and a healthy amount of criticism and high standards, I can not fathom why products ship with terrible user interfaces that are ugly, unintuitive, illogical, clunky, slow, awkward to use, or some nightmarish combination thereof. The Sigma DP1 has been accused of having a horrible UI, and it is one of the big points that people are hoping the DP2 has improved upon.

The menu system and interface is good. It’s not iPhone-incredible, but it’s not 1999-digicam-terrible either. Without reading the instructions I was able to have the camera set up and configured in a few minutes and the controls for navigating the menu seem fairly intuitive. No complaints here, but not a lot of praise either.

I don’t anticipate having to dive into the menu system too much now that the camera is set up. I always shoot RAW so I don’t care about in-camera white balance or image size, and the rest of the oft-used features are just a single level deep via the buttons on the back of the camera.

Adjusting Exposure settings:

Sigma nailed this one. Whether the camera is set to shutter priority, aperture priority, manual or ‘Program’ it is extremely easy to change the settings to what you want. There is no need to call up any menus and the motions are intuitive. The actual photographic operations for this camera were obviously designed by avid photographers, and it shows. No need to get verbose here– it just works.

Focusing:

The DP2 has 9 selectable autofocus points as well as a rather unusual method of manually focusing the lens. Instead of a ring on the lens itself, manually focusing the lens is done via a dial embedded in the top of the camera.

The autofocus, as far as I can tell, only looks at the 1 focus point that has been selected. I’m going to refrain from commenting too much on the focusing abilities here, so expect a nice detailed look at how it performs in Part 2.

Manual focusing is accomplished by turning a small wheel at the top of the camera with your thumb. The wheel turns smoothly and feels nice and solid; focus distance is marked off in meters, but there are no detents in the motion. Like many other live-view-enabled cameras it is possible to magnify the LCD’s image to aid in manually focusing; this seems to work well, but it seems like there’s an annoying additional button press somewhere in that workflow that I’ll have to play with in order to get a good read on it, so check back in Part 2 for more thoughts there.

Shooting Speed:

For this review I am using SanDisk Ultra II 4GB SDHC memory cards. I very much doubt that an ultra-fast card would improve write times significantly, but if somebody wants to go to the time and expense of testing that down to the millisecond please feel free to prove me wrong.

When the camera has been manually focused there is no discernable shutter lag. Press the button, and it takes a picture. No complaints there.

There is clearly some delay while the camera works its autofocus magic, but my intuition tells me that it’s a bit faster than run-of-the-mill p&s compacts. I haven’t had a problem yet with excessive focus hunting, but time will tell how well that works in more challenging conditions. Once focused, the camera takes a shot immediatly.

There is a burst setting as well, which will fire off 3 shots in somewhere under a second. This is great, although there’s a ~10sec. delay before the camera is ready to fire again if you fill up the 3-shot buffer. It’s not a dSLR, so quit whining.

Be sure to check out Carl Rytterfalk’s quick and dirty shooting speed test here.

Video:

The DP2 is not a video camera nor is it a convergence camera, but it does have the ability to record some basic low-res video. The video comes out at 320×240 @ 30fps, and a 1GB card will hold around 30 minutes of footage. Obviously you won’t want to use this as your primary video recording device, but the functionality is there if you absolutely need it in a pinch.

Here’s a quick and poorly-produced sample (and yes, that’s an IPA in a can. Oregon brewers are the best!):

DP2 Sample from Peter Franzen on Vimeo.

I’ll be sure to further explore the video capabilities for Review Round 2 – Irish Boogaloo, in 2 weeks.

Battery Performance:

Reports from other users have so far shown mediocre battery performance. Legend has it that the battery actually improves after a few charging cycles, so the initial 75 shots per charge that some people have complained about may not be an accurate portrayal of battery life. I went ahead and bought a second battery regardless.

What I do know is that the battery is completely discharged when it’s shipped to you with the DP2, which totally sucks. There’s nothing worse than getting a new toy in the mail and having to wait 2 hours before using it.

The Software:

The DP2 comes bundled with Sigma’s PhotoPro software. PhotoPro is a minimally-featured RAW processing and developing program. Like many photographers these days I’m a big fan of Lightroom (although I’d give Aperture a try if I used Macs), and any new photo developing program will inevitably be compared to it. I’d rather not get into a full software review here, especially since Adobe has included DP2 compatability with their newest release of Adobe Camera Raw, and the next update to Lightroom will include the ability to handle the DP2’s RAW files as well.

The bottom line: use PhotoPro to develop the .x3f RAW files if you have to, but do your real processing using Lightroom, Aperture, Photoshop, or your other favorite program. I will be exporting unsharpened .tiff files from PhotoPro until the DP2 is fully supported in Lightroom.

You can download the most recent version of PhotoPro here if you’d like to try it out.

Part 4: The Pictures

I’ll make this easy for everyone: The Sigma DP2 takes some f’ing incredible pictures.

Happy? Is that what you came here for? It’s a funky little piece of hardware that simply blows every other compact camera I’ve ever used out of the water when it comes to image quality.

The depth of field allowed by the large sensor accounts for some of that, but the fact that it doesn’t exhibit the terrible noise, chromatic abberation, or that hard-to-put-a-finger-on-it-graininess/smudgy/harsh quality that plagues small-sensored cameras is key here. The colors are smooth, the edges are crisp, and it’s often difficult to tell a DP2 image from a 40D image while side by side.

It’s just brilliant.

Handheld at ISO 800 in a restaurant? No problem:

Something a little more grungy:

Ok, so they’re not going to win any awards but it’s the best I could come up with in the 2 hours since I opened the box.

I should also note that I spent a grand total of 30 minutes of post-processing on all of those shots. They were imported into PhotoPro, I did a quick white-balance check, then they were exported as 8-bit .tiff files to Lightroom where I did a few more tweaks. Noise reduction was kept to a minimum.

I will be adding more images to this blog as the week goes on, in hopes of exploring and showing more of what this camera is and is not capable of accomplishing.

…

So that’s it for part 1 of this review. I have gone over the basics of the camera, how it differs from most other point & shoot compact cameras, and my first impressions of both its physical aspects and of the images that it produces. On Saturday I’m off to Ireland for a week of vacationing and wedding festivities which will hopefully provide ample time to put the DP2 through its paces, and give me a better feeling for the true capabilities of this camera. Stay tuned– I’ll be back in 10 days with a full write-up.

Until then, I hope to get some more pictures up here on the ole’ blog, so be sure to check back!

Ciao,

Peter

Edit, May 28th – I uploaded a few shots from an evening with the DP2 in today’s post. I’m off to Ireland for 10 days, so be sure to check back in a couple of weeks for Part 2 of the review and a whole lot more sample pictures.