The Jpeg option.

As I said, I’m not used to taking Jpeg images straight from the camera and haven’t done so since the early compacts that I had at the dawn of the digital age. Things have come on a bit since then!

So, over the Easter weekend I switched the SD14 over to the jpg option, achieved quite easily via the button to the top right of the LCD screen. A single press lights up the screen giving the four parameters that can be adjusted in this way. They are: ISO, WB, Resolution and Quality.

Pressing the right hand button on the daisy array scrolls through RAW, Fine, Norm and Basic and the left side one scrolls through the four resolutions: Super Hi, Hi, Med and Low. (The top and bottom control ISO and WB respectively).

I took a few images at the Super Hi/Fine setting and had a look at them on the PC but realised that I was not certain what I was looking for in a direct Jpeg. Yes, the images looked fine at a glance but at 100% there were some artefacts that I might not have been too happy with in critical work. But, lets be honest, if I was doing critical work I would not be shooting Jpegs!

Colour is one of the Foveon's strengths.

There are three examples.

Image 1 is from the SD14 at its native resolution of 2460x1760.(SDIM0253.jpg)

Image 2 is taken at the Super Hi resolution of 4608x3072. (SDIM0254.jpg)

Image 3 is from the Nikon at its native Bayer resolution of 4288x2848. (_DSC006.jpg)

Now the conclusion that I have come to is that there is not a lot of difference in the quality of the Super Hi against the Nikon D2X. Granted there is a slight difference in size and, if you want to, you are welcome to resize the two files in order to compare them at the same size. That would mean upsizing the D2X file to the SD14’s resolution and down sizing the SD14 image to the D2X resolution but if I do it for you it would hammer Stuart’s bandwidth!

The smaller SD14 image looks sharper and cleaner than either of the two larger files, but that is hardly surprising as considerably more information is used in the smaller physical space.

I’ll leave you to play and get on with some proper testing over the next day or so.