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I'm viewing them more now as 35mm adapter killers, which don't work well in low light. The 7D and 5D excell in low light when you want DOF control.

Nothing really matches them there. Is it any wonder that Philip Blooms videos emphasized those assets.

It's just all the footage I've seen with these cameras looks fantastic. Problem is I was all ready to grab the HMC40 and then I stumbled on the whole 7D discussion so this got me a little confused and conflicted. Problem is, most of us don't have the lolly to go out and buy both cameras so we just have to read all the reviews and figure out what's best based on what someone else says, not easy.

I think Duke M. got it right. They are 35mm adapter killers, not Red killers. This is a huge advance. In a very light package. The cumbersome-ness of those adapters is a thing of the past. The real issue now is panning for rolling shutter and aliasing. I believe RED knows this and their redesigns of the Scarlet are probably related.

Another great article, Barry. It's good to know all of this before making a purchase. And then if we still buy, we at least know the camera's limitations and can try to work around them. I hope you'll scrutinize the 1D Mark IV when it hits the shelves as well. With it's pricetage of $4999, I'd hope they'd made some improvements.

Kudos Barry. Usually it's been said that a picture is worth a thousand words. In this case, I find your words are just as strong as the pictures. I've known about true alaising since my first S-VHS & High 8 shots of a football field and at the time just didn't understand why a better (sharper image) looked worse than my VHS footage.

This also explains why when I shot footage using my HVX200 of a plant in my front yard blowing in the wind looked very soft compared to the same shot taken with my 7D. When I played them on a timeline and showed them to several people and asked them to pick the best one, they picked the 7D because it "appeared to be sharper".

I think this article should be required reading for everyone, whether they pick up a HD SLR or just continue to shoot with their regular video cameras.

Again Barry, thanks from all of us for your wonderful and thoughtful explaination.

eric

How do these aliasing issues compare with other HD cameras like the Sony EX3,
Red One etc. Is it just a matter of more processing power to define the actual detail in the image?

The EX3 and Red One largely avoid all aliasing complications. They're engineered to provide video images and use an appropriate anti-alias filter.

The differences also extend to the chips; in video or digital cinema cameras, they use sensors that are engineered and designed from the ground up to handle sustained frame rates at high enough rate. In the HDSLRs, they're using still-camera sensors that weren't designed for video usage. Accordingly, they have to "cheat" to get the information off the sensor fast enough, and that "cheating" is accomplished by only reading part of the sensor (either through pixel-binning or through line-skipping).

If you want alias-free imagery, you're going to want to look into a product that uses a sensor that's fast enough to be read out full-resolution at video frame rates.

(of course, video cameras can exhibit aliasing as well, depending on the strength of their anti-alias filters... it's just that the HDSLRs don't really have a choice, the aliasing comes about largely because they're trying to live in two worlds, stills and video, and they're doing so with a stills-oriented chip).

Barry, on a one hour documentary project targeted to TV distribution with a razor thin budget, and you had to pick one of your DSLR cameras right now, would you bring your GH1 or your 7D?

Neither, I'd use my HMC150. Right tool for the job, and the HMC150 excels at that type of work, way better than a DSLR.

But for sit-down interview shots, choosing between those two? No question I'd go with the GH1. It has longer record times (no 12-minute time limit), better 720/60 for the "reality" look if that's what the show calls for (and if it's 24p, then the sit-down interview is where the codec differences are completely eliminated), less color-fringing moire, and it's more video-friendly. Any perceived advantage of the 7D due to sensitivity/noise would be nullified by proper lighting, and the codec differences would be completely nullified, so there's pretty much no drawback and plenty of advantages to choosing the GH1 for that usage.

Unless Magic Lantern was available for the 7D; that might make the 7D the preferred choice.

But this really isn't the right thread to be discussing choices like that, this is about aliasing.

Yes, the issue with the Foveon is that if you look at a raw image, the colors are very under-saturated (compared to a raw, un-matrixed video from a 3 chip camera or even a Bayer Pattern CFA camera). This means that overall colorimetry suffers, along with noise performance because of the large matrix coefficients needed to get a reasonably saturated image. See pg 127 of Alan Robert's Circles of Confusion book for more information.

Also, the Foveon sensor does need an OLPF if aliasing is to be avoided. The Sigma cameras ommited the OLPF which leads people to think it's unnecessary, but if you read the Foveon literature you will find references to the necessity of adequate optical filtering. Now, because the colours are co-sited, you don't get false colors from the moire and aliasing - instead you just get typically ugly luma moire and aliasing. Even with a Bayer pattern CFA sensor used as it is in a DSLR (in stills mode), chroma moire is hardly ever an issue and can usually be effectively removed without ruining the look of the image, but in all sensor types, luma aliasing is a practically un-removable artifact.

Fact is - all sensors of all types will produce aliasing artifacts if they are not adequately optically filtered. There's no magic way around it. All you can do is eliminate the practical possibility of seeing them and do so without drastically reducing resolution.

Pixel Binning is a effectively a very poor downsampling filter, so either binning on sensor or further down the image chain can only make aliasing worse, not better. Of course, nearest neighbour sampling, which is what line skipping effectively is, is worse still. Neither should be seen as a proper alternative to a well designed (and usually expensive to implement properly) anti-alias downsampling filter.

Great article Barry!

Graeme