Emil Martinec has published a terrific, though highly technical, paper on camera sensors and what controls and constitues their noise and dynamic range characteristics. (Some of you probably know Emil from NatureScapes.net, and OpenPhotography forums, but I thought others here that don't frequent those sites might enjoy the paper as well.)
-- 14 bit ADCs are useless given the noise performance of current cameras. (You won't see any difference from 12-bit)
-- The "expose to the right" mantra is correct, but not because of the number of raw levels, only because there's a better signal to noise ratio in the highlight areas
-- The Panasonic FZ50 might have the best (most efficient for it's size) sensor at low ISO (better than SLRs)
Anyway, the whole thing is really well done and worth a read if you're interested in these types of things.
Thanks for that link Basil...a shame that DPReview forums are so difficult to read sometimes, but (for those that may want to read it) the author of a paper I linked to is pretty heavily involved in the discussion. And there's some good additional info from Thom Hogan as well as others.
Discussion
2 repliesEven if you're less technical, some of the info and examples are pretty informative (particularly the first two figures on this page, dealing with posterization)
The paper is available here.
Some of the more notable findings :
-- 14 bit ADCs are useless given the noise performance of current cameras. (You won't see any difference from 12-bit)
-- The "expose to the right" mantra is correct, but not because of the number of raw levels, only because there's a better signal to noise ratio in the highlight areas
-- The Panasonic FZ50 might have the best (most efficient for it's size) sensor at low ISO (better than SLRs)
Anyway, the whole thing is really well done and worth a read if you're interested in these types of things.
http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/readflat.asp?forum=1021&thread=28116333
Basil