Oddly enough on this sample the SD14 is more attractive to me...
That's the difference, though. The SD14 looks smoother and has more accurate colors overall. Though it obviously is suffering from resolution and moire issues, they are all blurred the same wherever they happen. It really looks like you're shooting with poor definition film and a lens with less than perfect optics as opposed to digital. At least in my opinion. But that's still a very pleasing result if you're taking scenery and other shots where every detail isn't critical.
Now, a lot of people probably don't like that "look", and that's fine as well. But Bayer sensors also have their share of problems with color balance and obvious blurring of certain parts of the image as they try to compensate. You'll often see red areas on roses for instance that are very blurry and ill-defined and green areas that pop out at you and are crisp in the same image.
http://www.ddisoftware.com/sd14-5d/A good writeup of the differences. Is one better than the other? Hard to say either way, since both have areas that they excel at and areas where you wish you could kick it in the rear end to make it work properly.
But a few highlights:
- The Foveon sensor has 1700 LPI resolution no matter what it's shooting at. Bayer sensors as you can see in the chart 1/4 the way down are all over the place for various colors(and why black and white resolution tests are junk - they must be color. Purple is a known problem area for Bayer sensors. And I'd rather it blow out yellowish like film and how our eyes see sunlight affecting objects than pure white.
- 2/3 the way down it shows how this can affect color images. I'd personally rather look at consistent results than varying resolutions, but then again, the Foveon/Sigma sensor is just too low. The sensor is effectively APS-C size and resolution(bit smaller actually). Huge fail here. But the results do look very nice for what it does render.
- The bottom images also show it well. The Bayer sensor has fairly cold and accurate images, but that's not what we see with our eyes(the SD14 is off from a technical perspective but is correct from a visual one)
http://www.polas.net/sigma/sd14/d200/sd14_vs_d200.phpHere it's a bit more mixed. Sigma wins for color and highlights in my book, but has a really awful DR because the sensor effectively is ISO 50 film and the rest is digital trickery and boosting of the signals. That's perhaps the biggest failing of the technology in that it's too much like film in this respect. The Fuji, otoh, has no such issues. The high quality mode does great with DR as well. And you can recover most photos that are slightly washed out in processing, which is impossible with other sensors.
note - his claims, IMO, are wrong about the highlights, as sunlight is *yellow* and our eyes expect yellowish white where there's too much sun and not pure white. True they do blow out far sooner, but it's color-correct over-saturation. It looks like you took Velvia and put it in a half-frame camera or old 35mm pocket camera. Of course, one advantage of both the Fuji and Sigma bodies is that they accept Nikon lenses(good choice here) and any crappy lens will produce the same consistent results(sigh). This can mean a good price savings but as a person who has dealt with medium format and black and white photography as well, it's too much to swallow. In fact, I had a SD10 a few years back and sold it because it was giving me beautiful but pocket camera results that were virtually identical to my old 35mm Konica rangefinder (circa 1980 or so - still sees use on trips as a backup). I'd hoped that the SD15 was a full frame sensor but no luck. And Fuji's idiocy boggles my mind. Best sensor on the market in a non SLR body...
