DP2 Quattro

[soboyle]

Agree with the review. All the weaknesses that Michael and Kevin mention are there. They were there for the Merrill's too, and I'm finding the Quattro an improvement on the Merrill, just not the jump I was hoping for.  The best workflow to minimize time in Sigma photo pro is to shoot jpg and raw, review the jpgs in lightroom, then process the select raws in SPP. I added a Hoodman 3.2 LCD loupe to give the Quattro a usable viewfinder in bright sun. It adds bulk, but I use it on a tripod most of the time so works for me. Image quality is excellent, a slight improvement over the Merrill's, color is also better.
It's a quirky camera, has limited use, does not have huge dynamic range, doesn't fall to hand well, but if you treat it like a medium format camera, as I did with the Merrill's, then some of these issues go away. Not for everyone or every subject, excellent IQ within a narrow range of use.

[Alan Smallbone]

I agree with some of it. SPP is slow but it seems to work ok on a PC, it seems a lot of the issues are with a MAC version. I preview all my files using Breezebrowser or Faststone viewer, I only shoot raws. Then I pick the few I want to process, develop them to an editable 16bit tif and import into Lightroom or PS and do final edits. I find I can get to a neutral image with a correct exposure fairly quickly in SPP, so not that grueling a task. Also with the Sigmas I do not shoot a lot of images and only process the few that are worth the time. I did the trial with the Quattro and knew what I was getting into, love the resolution and look of the images when the conditions are right. I have other cameras for other purposes. I then picked up a relatively inexpensive DP3M and that will pretty much do it for these cameras. I still love and use my Fuji XT-1 and for long lenses the 5DMII. The Sigmas are a niche camera for specific uses.

Alan

[pflower]

I think we are being spoiled by all this technology.  Following Michael's review of the DP2M I bought one.  I then bought a DP3M and have now bought backups of both them since the prices have plummeted.  I am going to pass on the Quattro but the Merrills are my favourite cameras by far.

Yes SPP is a serious pain compared to other software.  But I can still process 100 files in it quicker than I can develop and print just a contact sheet  from just a couple of rolls of 120 film (if you include the drying time). Actually to process 100 images on film I would have to develop, fix, dry and then contact about 9 rolls of 120.

 Mind you I still use SPP 5.5 or whatever.  But I just batch process to Tiffs whilst doing something else and then weed things out in Lightroom.  Actually the tedium of SPP might be a good thing - you have to think before making half a dozen exposures of the same scene from marginally different angles or perspectives.

At the end of the day photography is about making images.  The Merrills plus SPP make spectacular ones.  Well, they need a bit of input from the photographer as well.

[NancyP]

I have the Merrills, not the Quattro. The software issue is huge, and I just don't understand why Sigma doesn't hire someone who has experience in top-level design of imaging software.

 I like the idea of shooting RAW plus .jpg , something I avoid on my Canons (twice the crappy files to ditch). Being able to pre-screen in LR to get rid of the dross could be helpful.

Effects of knowing that SPP lies ahead: I shoot like I am shooting film, each frame has a cost in time. I tend to shoot fewer on-spec shots as a "warm-up", and spend more time setting up the shot.

[Misirlou]

I don't have a Quattro, just the older DP2M. SPP is not a great piece of software, but it functions tolerably on a PC. It's slower than Lightroom, but the Mac delays mentioned in both reviews just aren't something I ever see on my old Core2Quad with only 8G of RAM. I've never shot even a single jpg. I've done about 2,500 total shots in 11 months, all raw.

I guess I treat that camera sort of like a 4X5 with no movements. I choose my shots pretty carefully, then get out a tripod and go to work. Sure, the screen is terrible, but it's no worse than an upside down, reverse image ground glass. I hear the sensor is only good up to 400 ISO, but since mine is always on a tripod, I've never shot over 200 anyway.

The results come with the same frustrations I remember from 4X5. A lot of times I get perfectly exposed shots that have some niggling composition problem, resulting from my not being able to see the screen well in the sun. Like maybe a tree branch that goes right to the edge of the frame. I really need to coble up a hood arrangement.

When everything goes right, the TIFF files out of SPP are remarkable. Very little tweaking required in Adobe apps. On a recent trip, I took 2,200 shots with my 6D, and about 300 with the DP2M. I printed my favorite six shots from the trip, all from the DP2M files. One sold immediately, two others are in a local show (and one of those sold right away). The other three are going on my own walls.

I'm interested in the Quattros, but only if firmware updates give it the ability to noticeably increase resolution over the Merrills. It would be great if Sigma came up with Foveon cameras that behaved like all the other cameras we have now. Believe me, I understand the pain. But they're still productive cameras, provided you're willing to use them in very specific ways.

Not exactly a ringing endorsement, I suppose.

[ednazarko]

"Other than THAT, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you enjoy the play?"  It began to feel like they were savaging the camera and Sigma.  When something's that far wrong, why review it in detail?

Makes me a little sad though.  I'm a huge fan of scrappy underdogs, and in this case it seems things went the wrong direction.  The number of misses in the user experience area are really pretty astonishing when you tally them up. 

I had hopes that the unusual form factor might be good.  One of my favorite compact camera designs was the old Nikon twist-body camera.  It seemed weird until you started using it, and then just became second nature.  I'm convinced that great digital cameras really don't have to look like their film predecessors.  For a long time everyone seemed to think a camera had to have bellows.   But no one has really come up with a breakthrough - except phone manufacturers.  The strength of that design shows in its widespread acceptance and use.

[David Mantripp]

Kevin, Michael, can you maybe explain WHY Adobe is so set against Sigma? Is the engineering too complex ?(though if Brian Griffith could do it on his own for the Merrills, surely the might of Adobe can muddle through?)  The market size argument doesn't hold much water - first, there's a touch of self-fulfilling prophecy to it, in that if Lr and Ps did offer support, maybe sales would increase - and second, anyway, there are more tbsn a few supported cameras that don't have massive market share. Various MF backs for example. Is it just that Adobe / PhaseOne don't believe that the Foveon output is stable/predictable, and therefore they don't want to open up to potential massive customer support issues? Or are they being actively hindered by Sigma?

Maybe everybody going to Photokina can drop by the Sigma booth and embarass them by asking them to demo SPP? Or just call for the head of the lead sw architect? :-)

I sympathise with you trying to use the DP2Q in the Arctic, Kevin. I tried using the DP2M in the Antarctic... total nightmare, made worse by the hint of what it might have been able to produce had it been even vaguely usable with gloves....

One other question - when all is said and done, is the Quattro really much of a progression over the Merrill? I get the impression that it isn't. Especially as the Merrill has now got quite reasonable workflow, with Iridient's roundtripping to/from Lr (or Aperture) feature.

[michael]

Neither Kevin nor I are in a position to speak for Adobe. One can speculate though that the amount of engineering resources needed to write support for a very specialized and different sensor design are not commensurate with the number of potential users.

Michael

[BernardLanguillier]

It really depends on the way you look at the camera.

I find my DP2 Quattro to be a much more forgiving tool than the DP2m it replaced in terms of battery life, screen, overall usage envelope.

Yes, software sucks but jpgs are excellent. What I do is to:
- Select folder in SPP to launch thumbnail creation,
- Review the jpgs in Bridge in //,
- Only re-develop the very few keepers that I want with the best possible quality.

This is not a high volum images camera in the first place, so this approach works reasonnably well on my last gen Mac Pro.

I hope that Iridient Developper will find a way to support the DP2 Quattro files.

Cheers,
Bernard

[JV]

I hope that Iridient Developper will find a way to support the DP2 Quattro files.

How good was the support of Iridient Developer for the DPx Merrill files?

[powerslave12r]

As an aside, there's a typo here:

"Corn and Clouds. Clearview, Ontario. August, 2014
Sigma DP2 Quarttro. JPG. ISO 100."

[peterzpicts]

Hello, My name is Paul and I'm a Foveon addict....

Mike and Kevin gave a fair assessment on the Quattro situation.
I have yet to update my SD14 out of the hope that someday I will be able to afford a Sigma DSLR that can give me the reliable and flexible capabilities of my almost as old Nikon D90.  I'm still waiting... Sigma has moved the ball down the court with the Quattro on many fronts as far as Speed, Color(a real break through) & Battery life. But Sigma never really catches up and is still a lap behind where others are going. The SPP project management is a major embarrassment, but Sigma wanted to ship the camera as promised after shipping so many cameras late IMHO.  So we have a new camera shipped with public beta software to handle the new format raws. I guess we will see if the update in October will bring happiness in the Sigma Universe.

[David Mantripp]

How good was the support of Iridient Developer for the DPx Merrill files?

In my opinion, very good. In the present tense, not the past!

Early versions had some colour cast issues, but these were soon sorted out. Current version leaves no reason to use DPP, even if for Merrill files, on Mac, the last iteration of v5 was in my experience usable. Not exactly fluid, but nothing like the nightmare experiences reported for v6.

[Hans Kruse]

A sad story about misjudgment by Sigma. Strange considering how Sigma is reinventing themselves in very good lenses lately. Btw. I think one review had been more than enough
Having said that, I don't quite understand why there was not focus in IQ given that it would (or at least should be) easy to just convert the RAW files to 16 bit TIFF and import into Lightroom or Capture One and then process the files. Also it should be easy to view the RAW files extracting the embedded JPG files using one of many apps than can do that. Therefore in my view the review does come forward more negative than needed. But no excuses can be made for the bad software that comes with the camera, of course. Really amateurish by Sigma.

[Kevin Raber]

Hans, If you read the review you would see there is no easy way to convert files to TIFF.  And, we did say the IQ was excellent under proper conditions.  We did two reviews in this case as we were trying to give this camera a chance and make sure that it was not just one of us having a bad experience.  Also, by converting to a TIFF you throw any chance of working from the RAW file and doing proper recovery of shadows and highlights as well as other corrections.  And, considering I couldn't even get SPP to work on my MAC and I know others experiencing the same problems, how could I even do the conversion.  Yes, I have a lot of images I shot in RAW that I would love to convert.  They will have to wait now until some rainy day in the future.

Kevin Raber

[Alan Smallbone]

Well I agree a lot with Bernard. It is a usable camera that is good for some special images. Getting tif is not that difficult, at least with a PC. Once you adjust exposure and WB and get a usable neutral file the editing is best accomplished in other programs that are more suited for it.

As far as evaluating images, on a PC you can use Breezebrowser and also FastStone viewer to view the image from the embedded jpg in the raw file. Faststone is free and will show a full screen version, it is pretty easy to evaluate which images are worth more attention and processing in the very slow SPP.  Rawdigger can also read the files if you want to evaluate the raw image from the different color planes.

As a side note there is a new firmware and incremental SPP version available as well today from Sigma. It will never be a mainstream camera but I do not think that is their intention. From early reports that I have seen there is small increase in speed. I am hoping that when they finally release V6.1 it will be more usable.

Alan

[Hans Kruse]

Hans, If you read the review you would see there is no easy way to convert files to TIFF.  And, we did say the IQ was excellent under proper conditions.  We did two reviews in this case as we were trying to give this camera a chance and make sure that it was not just one of us having a bad experience.  Also, by converting to a TIFF you throw any chance of working from the RAW file and doing proper recovery of shadows and highlights as well as other corrections.  And, considering I couldn't even get SPP to work on my MAC and I know others experiencing the same problems, how could I even do the conversion.  Yes, I have a lot of images I shot in RAW that I would love to convert.  They will have to wait now until some rainy day in the future.

Kevin Raber

Kevin, I DID read the review and my comments are based on that! A simple convert to TIFF without any editing would surely have been possible. Unless there are clipping in either highlights or shadows you can use Lightroom to adjust to your hearts content. Not 100% as optimal as directly from RAW but close if you work on 16 bit TIFFs. And why not getting a version of SPP that could work? It took me about 30 minutes to find and download SPP and sample images from Imaging Resource and convert them to 16 bit TIFF. Attached a screen shot from Lightroom of Canon 5D III at ISO 100 and the Sigma Quattro at ISO 100. Other reviewers had a version that worked and they could process the RAW files. Yes, there were references to IQ (without much detail and no comparison to a Bayer sensor camera), but the focus was on all that was wrong and I still feel one review would have been enough. I do agree that a fairly negative review was fine assuming what was reported was correct and I have no personal experience with the camera. But other reviews are not nearly as negative.

[soboyle]

For anyone interested, this is how I added the Hoodman 3.2 using a Desmond lens plate.
An ugly bugger, no doubt, but it works. I can't speak that highly of the optics in the Hoodman 3.2, but it works in the bright sun, and manual focus is now usable.

I've found that autofocus on the DP2Q tends to grab the background if trying to focus on a foreground object like the attached image.

[Kevin Raber]

But other reviews are not nearly as negative.

The key word being NEARLY.  We wrote about our experience.  We did involve Sigma when things didn't go right. The error message I showed in my article still is there today when trying to boot up SPP.  I refuse to process RAW files in a manner that defeats the reason for working with RAW.

Kevin

[Hans Kruse]

But other reviews are not nearly as negative.

The key word being NEARLY.  We wrote about our experience.  We did involve Sigma when things didn't go right. The error message I showed in my article still is there today when trying to boot up SPP.  I refuse to process RAW files in a manner that defeats the reason for working with RAW.

Kevin

As mentioned I downloaded SPP (edited: on my MacBook Pro retina) today and generated TIFF files using it.