Is the RX[x] Coming? (And: Magic)

It's been very close to a year (the anniversary of the announcement date is tomorrow*) since Sony delighted the camera cognoscenti of the world with the RX1, the smallest-ever full-frame digital camera. Barely larger than a point-and-shoot, the RX1 featured very traditional controls. The current version is popular enough that it's currently in a stock-depleted state more or less everywhere.

Now, David Kilpatrick at PhotoClubAlpha is bandying the rumor that photographers from two French photojournalism agencies, including a big name photographer from Magnum, are "roaming the night-time streets of Paris" with a soon-to-be-announced interchangeable-lens version of the tiny FF wonder.

True, or rumor? You know how these things sometimes turn out to be wishful thinking. The article claims we'll know by October.

•     •     •

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, I had to go to Michigan on business last weekend. We sold of the lakeside manse that had been in the family for exactly 100 years—a bittersweet event to be sure, although it seems to me a bit more on the "sweet" side—I mean, it's scary being stuck with a million-dollar white elephant that, in an ideal world, really needs either a half million dollars' worth of work or an expensive teardown. (The house was never owned by me, I should add.) We'd been struggling to find a respectable buyer for years, with no success. I loved the place in my youth, but I have my memories; all things must pass. Good luck to he or she who now pays the bills.

Anyway, the journey involved another trip across the lake on the Lake Express, and I took a few snaps, something I seem to do almost by habit even when preoccupied with other things.

Nothing happened, which is okay. In pool, there's an expression: "The balls roll funny for everybody." Same with photography. Sometimes the photo gods smile, sometimes they don't. No good shots this trip. Just from a technical perspective, however, once again I was amazed by something I wrote about in my initial review of my NEX-6: the metering system's ability to ignore the sun.

This is more or less straight out of the camera, shot with absolutely no exposure controls. It's a little on the underexposed side, maybe, but not much: there's lots of detail in the not-quite-silhouetted figure.

Crop manipulated to show the detail in the file

I suppose it's not good for me to admit that I have no idea how a camera works**, but, well, I have no idea how they do that. It was a bit hazy out, but that sun was bright, brother. If there's one thing every photographer has always known, it's that you can't just point an autoexposure camera straight at the sun and expect everything to be all right. Every other camera I've ever used would clamp down the exposure to compensate, and you'd have to figure out some way to compensate back.

I'm mildly curious about how this is accomplished, but I guess I don't really need to know. I've considered that it could be an incident meter hidden somewhere in or on the camera, an algorithm programmed to ignore subject brightness past a certain level, or magic.

I've decided it's magic. I'm okay with that explanation. All I have to remember is what the camera does visually; I don't need to know how it does it.

Mike
(Thanks to Robin Pywell)

*Thanks to Amazon's dpreview for archiving these facts. A most useful site.

**Except that none of us really has much idea how any digital camera works.

Original contents copyright 2013 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Oskar Ojala: "My feeling is that live view cameras are more accurate in metering than traditional cameras, simply because a lot of useful analysis can be made from the image from the sensor, whereas light meters rely on some reflection patterns."

Mike replies: See also Kevin P.'s comment in the Comments section.

Pak-Ming Wan: "It is probably doing some sort of funky real-time histogram mapping algorithm that caps X% of blown highlights and Y% of dark beyond black. That's got to be more accurate than just measuring the scene over, say, 50 different areas and then mapping it to the theoretical dynamic range of the sensor. Back at the ranch, you're then tone mapping this on your computer and getting a much better on-screen result again. Why manufacturers haven't built in tone mapping (shadow/light areas) into the JPEG processors is beyond me...it's the two most useful sliders in Lightroom and I think digital cameras (with live view) should have those as settings as well."

Comments

[Roger Bradbury]

As Arthur C. Clarke said, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" and there's the old maintenance advice, "if it's working don't faff with it" : ]

[HT]

Mike, have you read The Big House by George Howe Colt? It's an enjoyable read about an East Coast family who has to sell their summer home. I found myself sharing their nostalgia for the house, even though I've never seen it, let alone set foot in it.

[Bryan Willman]

My impression is that one of the biggest gains of the m240 over the m9, and the x100s over the x100, is in this area (for both of them.)
I don't know how either compare to the Rx1, but in my shooting both seem better than their predecessors.

[Carsten S]

I do not know what really is going on, but these beasts recognize faces, so I am not surprised that they recognize a picture with the sun in it. So I guess it is just software, or as you call it, magic.

[Will Frostmill]

Mike, that cropped image weighs in a 532kb, and takes a noticeable amount of time to load and render. Just fyi, if you are having traffic spikes - anyone loading the main page loads that image.

Will

[Kevin Purcell]

Multi-segment (or matrix to use Nikon's trademarked term) has got a lot smarter over the years. It works well when it works (and then some small fraction of the time gets confused).

All of the multi-segment metering algorithms use luminance data from the whole frame plus color data plus the distribution of both in the scene to try to figure out what's getting the metering right for this scene.

This is rather than just assuming "Pick an exposure that makes the whole thing mid-tone gray on average". I suspect is your mental metering algorithm roughly based on center-weighed systems of the past. The downside of multi-segment is it can be an unknowable black box.

For example, check out how your multi-segment metering system meters off your hand in the bright sun (get it to cover a chunk but not all of the frame). If you stick a gray card there you'll get the same exposure. Most systems realize that they're metering from skin in the center of frame and not from gray card and compensate for that +1 EV exposure compensation that caucasian skin needs. Often they even manage to determine the correct offset for different skin types.

This can be handy in street photography in bright sun: use multi-segment metering with manual exposure. Meter off your hand in sunlight (or in shade) to set the exposure for shots in sunlight (or in the shade). Look at "Gustavo Minas" street photography in London 2013 on Flickr to see multi-segment metering with manual exposure in action.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/gustavominas/sets/72157633419332487/

Regardless of your photographic style multi-segment metering with manual exposure can be a useful trick in constant light especially with a histogram or blinkies to help set the highlights. Some might find this anathema but the technology in those newfangled cameras can help even skilled old time photographers.

[Will]

I've always avoided having the sun in frame for very long or at all, even if just setting up a shot, if using a mirrorless camera. I just feel like direct, focused sunlight shouldn't strike an exposed sensor for any meaningful length of time. It might just be paranoia on my part, but with dSLRs, I at least knew that it was an optical path until I pressed the shutter. With my Fuji I'm more worried about some form of sensor burn(-in).

Will

[Kevin Purcell]

I also note with some amusement that one of the latest iPhone 5 sample shots is a "straight into the sun with something in the foreground" shot which is exposed nicely for the forward scatter from grass in the foreground.

I don't know how many times they took that shot (!) but I suspect this "correct metering with large highlight in frame" was a feature they tweaked in the iPhone 5 camera software (or camera module - it isn't clear who made it).

e.g. see it here http://www.steves-digicams.com/assets_c/2013/09/iPhone_5S_photo-21140.html

Even good cellphone cams can do good multi-segement metering (they need to do it more than anyone else!).

Don't worry (too much) about sensor damage when shooting into the sun. The IR filter in front of the sensor should cope with that for "normal" intermittent use.

For those that don't know: SLRs and DSLRs use a seperate full frame RGB metering sensor to do the same sort of thing a mirrorless/compact camera use the main sensor for.

[Christopher Lane]

With all due respect to the technical explanations above, I like the Arthur C. Clarke view. It is magic!