I’ve at all times had an curiosity in pictures, and from an early age I grew to become the designated photographer at household occasions and holidays, usually handed an affordable disposable digicam and set free photographing family and friends. Of course, ready for the movie to return again had a sure magic to it, however predictably this grew to become changed by a digital compact digicam in my teenagers as they grew to become inexpensive.
My first ‘proper’ digicam, nonetheless, was a Sigma SD14 – on the time I believed this was a wonderfully regular alternative, although trying again on it now I now comprehend it was a slightly quirky digicam. Sigma carved a reputation for itself as a producer of dependable and stable third-party choices through the years, although in latest instances has stepped into the next gear with extra premium optics, seen in its Art and Sports lenses. When it got here to cameras nonetheless, Sigma tends to be the outlier, and straying removed from the norm. This was seen most not too long ago seen with the corporate’s full-frame mirrorless Sigma BF.
I used to be a pictures scholar once I purchased my Sigma SD14. I had owned a Sigma DP1 compact digicam beforehand, and the lenses out there in Sigma mount had been on the time cheaper than the identical optics for Canon and Nikon – as a scholar each little helped! Some of my cut price buys included a Sigma 50mm f/1.4 EX DG HSM and 70-300mm f/4-5.6 DG Macro.
Rather naively, on the time I don’t suppose I absolutely understood its distinctive digital sensor know-how. Though in fact being a digicam journalist I now know all about them. Sigma cameras, like my SD14, use a Foveon chip. Modern digital sensors usually use the ‘Bayer’ array filter sample (although there are exceptions comparable to Fujifilm’s X-Trans pattern).
With CMOS sensors that use the Bayer array there is a grid of red, green and blue filters placed over individual pixels, with half of this being dedicated to green as the human eye is more sensitive to this colour. The camera also uses a process called demosaicing to interpolate – effectively this is where your camera takes its best guess as to what the missing colours should be.
Foveon sensors are special because they use three layers of stacked photodiodes, each sensitive to its own blue, red or green color channel. One of the greatest injustices with Sigma’s Foveon technology (in my humble opinion) was perhaps a lack of marketing… Foveon cameras were usually billed as having a very high number of megapixels. While this is technically true, with each red, green and blue layer containing its own set of pixels, this usually got mixed up with total image resolution and often came across a bit misleading. My Sigma SD14 for example, had 14MP of color data split over three color layers, but the actual resolution of each of these was 4.7MP so the total resolution for how large you could blow up the image or crop in was limited to quite a meager amount.
The Foveon sensor on my SD14 always produced punchy colors that looked quite filmic, though I often found myself limited to a low ISO for best image quality.
Image credit: Dan Mold
With three individual color layers for blue, red and green the colors in images produced by Foveon sensors were its standout feature.
Image credit: Dan Mold
Low light and high ISOs tended to be a weak spot in Foveon technology as it couldn’t produce the same image quality in these situations as conventional CMOS sensors. Here you can see quite a lot of mottling in the blacks – a common occurance when I pushed the ISO any further than ISO400 on my SD14.
Image credit: Dan Mold
One of the draws that sold me on my SD14 was the ability to pick up high quality Sigma lenses like the Sigma 50mm f/1.4 EX DG HSM for a bargain compared to the Canon and Nikon counterparts
Image credit: Dan Mold
Although the image quality on my Sigma SD14 was limited to a total of just 5MP, it had three times as much color data to play with and its colors to my eye came pretty close to those shot on 35mm film
Image credit: Dan Mold
High contrast scenes were usually handled quite well and the sensor could pick up subtle differences in color and tone so long as the sensor sensitivity was kept low
Image credit: Dan Mold
I took this image as a photography student using my Sigma DP1 and it shows one of the challenges Foveon shooters would come up against – dealing with unusual flare patterns (seen around the street lights) which I would put down to light reflecting between the three color layers.
Image credit: Dan Mold
I love many of the images I took with my Foveon cameras over the years and the colours always looked particularly vivid. The black and white photos also really popped as the internal IR filter could simply be popped off the camera allowing infrared photos to be taken with ease. However, I think it was a bit too ahead of its time as the processors evidently struggled to handle the vast amounts of data from three colour layers – I remember all too well regularly waiting up to 30 seconds for the memory buffer to clear. It also had no live view or video function, and it really struggled to produce clean images at higher ISO values meaning the CMOS camera I upgraded to after owning my SD14, was a much better all-rounder.
I am, however, more optimistic than ever for the future of Foveon. We now have powerful processors capable of recording vast amounts of data such as Canon’s EOS R5 Mark II with its 45MP RAW files, pre-capture and 8K video and suitably fast CFexpress cards now, too.
I’m still holding out hope for the long-awaited full-frame Foveon from Sigma, and with some clearer marketing that leans more into color quality than a misleading large number of megapixels, would give it every chance of success.
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Take a look at the best DSLR cameras as well as our Sigma BF review. For more info on Sigma’s ground-breaking sensor tech be sure to read our article: Will Foveon sensors will ever return?