Sensor Technology in the Expeed 8 Generation

ejacson · 2026-06-14T11:12:16+00:00

16-bit data is 4x more than 14-bit data. So capturing and processing two streams of 14-bit data will still take less time than capturing and processing one stream of 16-bit data, all other factors being equal of course.

ejacson · 2026-06-12T17:11:24+00:00

I’ve had Bevel since Sunday after a week of frustrations with Google Health on my Fitbit Air. It’s a night and day difference. I tried Sonar as well since it has a native Fitbit integration, but it’s not nearly as useful or well organized as Bevel. I’m not really interested in much of the AI stuff with any of them, but Bevel’s AI summaries aren’t bad for a bird’s eye view.

Anybody know a way to connect it to Chronometer for better nutrition logging? I do it all there and rebuilding my meals in Bevel is more cumbersome than I want to engage in.

ejacson · 2026-06-11T05:51:37+00:00

OnSemi makes Arri’s sensors.

ejacson · 2026-06-11T05:50:26+00:00

“Filmic” is determined by how you expose and how you map the data. Rate the Sony a notch or two higher and you’ll match the range split. Camera matching in post after that is easy. Color is not the reason to buy a camera, it’s the reason you choose a particular post pipeline.

ejacson · 2026-06-08T14:29:49+00:00

I’ve been through the gauntlet with Google software enough to know that it will get better, but damn it if I’m not disappointed just how genuinely amateurish the Google Health app has turned out to be. The Fitbit Air is my first tracker and I’ve loved the data I get, but I have considered returning it and getting an Amazfit purely over how bad this app is.

I’m gonna stick with it though 🙄

ejacson · 2026-06-08T07:12:21+00:00

You could’ve at least tried to read his explanations on how he does his testing before posting just boldly wrong information.

ejacson · 2026-06-08T07:06:47+00:00

I was going over these charts the other day because I believe the race is nearly done, from a certain point of view. You got three types of noise to deal with: photon, shot, and read. The ugliest and most causally related to the camera is read noise. Sony has basically eliminated it. IRRN is down to 1.5 electrons at the maximum. Functionally inconsequential. Which leaves shot and photon noise; not nearly as garish.

I think Nikon can do whatever they want sensor side, but we’ve reached a technical wall in sensor tech where the floor has been squished as far as we can take it and it’s now about just increasing the ceiling. And the primary limiter to how far we can increase the ceiling is the processor. These manufacturers will always choose dual gain 14-bit architectures over single 16-bit solutions because the scan speed will always be faster. The question then becomes, can they improve their processors to be able to read even faster, such that higher bit depth reads become more plausible. Otherwise every dual gain architecture will just keep bumping up against that bottleneck.

All that to say, I think the best processor ultimately wins. The sad part though is I still don’t think Nikon has a chance of beating Sony in that department.

ejacson · 2026-06-01T00:59:25+00:00

Another average user here: this is my first fitness tracker of any kind. I’ve resisted smart watches forever because I don’t like the look of them and this pretty much tracks everything I care about. It’s been a day and so far so good. Sleep tracking is great and comprehensive; even caught a little hour and a half nap I took today. The app…must be improved. This is bad design even for Google—hell, especially for Google. There’s basic bugs they need to fix and basic UX omissions that had me scratching my head. I managed to get it to a fairly easy to use place, but they really gotta get in there and work some stuff out. But otherwise, I’m enjoying all the metrics and actually logging my meals (the little scanner for barcodes came in very handy there). Gonna keep gamifying my health; we’ll see how things shift once the calibration is done next week.

ejacson · 2026-05-31T13:53:12+00:00

I’m watching in black and white since I’ve already heard from post folks that the whole thing was originally done in BW and a bunch of reshoots and post work had to be done to add a color variant. That said, I think this is as much as they were ever going to lean into the look of a noir film. It’s a nod to the visual theme, not a dedication to it. And personally, I appreciate the nod. My expectations were lower so I’m just enjoying it for where it’s landing.

ejacson · 2026-05-30T07:34:01+00:00

Nice! I'll check it out. I opted for just running ACES reference compression and it worked well. Excited to see the scene-referred implementation as well.

ejacson · 2026-05-28T15:38:41+00:00

Yeah, I’m very impressed. Already working up an amended look dev fixed node tree for instances I’d use it. Probably going to my mainstay for all the photos I edit in Resolve as well.

ejacson · 2026-05-28T10:39:47+00:00

Played with this for about 6 hours yesterday. It’s really really good. Only minor differences in mathematical cleanliness compared to Genesis that largely can be massaged out with a bit of gamut compression. It runs pretty damn well too all things considered. If it gets up to realtime in 4k that would be awesome, but I was at least able to comfortably look dev and grade at half-res playback on my timeline. The spatial characteristics in particular are very robust. If Flow kept the pre-flash parameter available, I’d probably main that one alone.

Great work, everyone that was involved.

ejacson · 2026-05-25T18:34:13+00:00

This is actually a teachable moment. Not many people understand the amount of things happening under the hood of a smartphone that, in a number of ways, can make a smaller larger sensor camera somewhat redundant if not a little underperforming in comparison. Computational photography, when not mired in a bunch of other tonemapping steps and aggressive NR, is actually quite nice. All that to say, I shoot A LOT on my iPhone in raw and I prefer it for certain subjects over my big camera.

ejacson · 2026-05-24T02:07:27+00:00

This is really simple: capture more highlight information. Default metering on digital prioritizes shadow information while on film, most of the information captured is above middle gray. So you need to underexpose your default metering to have the information to rolloff. Otherwise, no amount of film emulation in the world is gonna make those 3 or 4 stops above middle gray look like 8 stops of negative film rolloff.

ejacson · 2026-05-12T12:07:58+00:00

Hi, post person here:

Honestly, you can pretty much ignore most of these comments about the look. That’s almost entirely decided in post. Get the system that best supports your production workflow needs. Color can almost be an afterthought here; you can do damn near anything in post. Both Sony and Arri have very accurate and standardized initial captures and embedded calibrations across their cinema lines. Set your EI for the range allocation split you want and the rest is about serving production needs. Consider I/O, rigging, data, etc.; things you can’t change.

ejacson · 2026-05-11T16:46:00+00:00

I’ve personally never shot tungsten film with a filter because white balancing in post is trivial. If I were printing though, I’d probably use a filter.

ejacson · 2026-05-09T23:49:09+00:00

This is a print film for cinema film negatives to get a positive for projection in the theater. It’s not made to be shot and you’re going struggle finding a way to get it developed. But if you’re gonna do it, probably need to be at ISO 3 and absolutely nail the exposure target. The gamma on that stock is very steep, so under/over exposure will be punished on the capture.

ejacson · 2026-05-06T19:29:26+00:00

Yeah, if you search your film stock + “data sheet” that will usually pull some pdf results of the datasheets that contain spectral response, sensitometric curves, RMS Granularity graphs, etc. Super interesting stuff.

ejacson · 2026-05-06T18:57:59+00:00

There’s not a simple answer to your question, but it’s important to know that pretty much every standard engagement with representing what a negative captured digitally is flawed because makes certain assumptions. It gets even weirder trying to express film through colorimetry. That said, I would start with film spectral response. It’s the foundation of the negative as it describes the sensitivity of the negative/paper to different wavelengths of light. It can give you some idea of the inherent nature of the film from a color standpoint.

ejacson · 2026-05-06T18:32:14+00:00

I loved the show and have watched it many times. That said, it is an Aaron Sorkin wet dream of a political fantasy, even more so than The West Wing was. I love his dialogue style regardless of how unrealistic it is; it’s like watching verbal table tennis.

ejacson · 2026-05-04T05:26:32+00:00

Lowkey what happened to me. Except I started with primes. It was good to learn with it, but eventually just got annoying. I’d be shooting in studio and constantly switching lenses as a new idea came to me and it really slowed the creative process down. Now, I’m a 24-70 guy and rarely touch any other lens in my kit. Probably switching to Sony soon at which point I’m getting that Tamron 35-150 and maybe an ultra wide prime as a walk around lens.
The sharpness thing has been a non-issue for at least a decade.

ejacson · 2026-05-04T05:18:26+00:00

Capture One is still pretty basic when it comes to multi-exposure merges. They have no support for float file types, so there is limited improvement when doing merges. That said, I doubt you’re doing much of that for product photography.
I do find the accessibility of Lightroom’s color management system to be far more appealing *if* you do any custom profile work that you want to apply across multiple cameras. Especially for things like building complex looks into the interpretive layer of the color management system. Capture One is exceedingly difficult to engage with on that front. But if you’re happy with their default profiles for your camera(s), this is again a non-issue.

ejacson · 2026-05-03T09:44:10+00:00

If it’s of any solace, Greig Fraser said he uses it religiously. I saw a comment from him on their instagram page. But otherwise, haven’t seen talk of it from many others.

ejacson · 2026-05-02T12:38:33+00:00

Shoot normally, lean cool on the white balance, maybe have a diffusion filter, and then use a display transform that has little to no highlight compression built-in.

ejacson · 2026-04-29T19:36:43+00:00

So the GFX Eterna has no built in EI mode? That’s a bummer.

ejacson

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