Rule Breaking Cameras

Cameras are a funny business.

More than most other areas of consumer engineering, camera design is a clear lesson in the trade-off.

We all wish for a camera with a giant sensor that can also take tiny lenses. With a built in EVF but no bigger than a pack of cards. With a battery that lasts all week but with a big, bright LCD screen on the back.

We want it all.

And while the smartphone industry has quickly converged on a design that is a thin slab of glass with the trade-offs being limited to screen size and the power of the little computer inside, the camera business is still something of a free for all.

Witness the reaction to the newly announced Leica T. I’ll have more to say about that later, but it’s interesting how angry some folks are when a company that they will never buy from tries a new combination of trade-offs.

The effort to create a camera that does everything well leads to the middle pack of me too products that are all more or less the same (modulo the current state of the components — sensors, batteries and cpus — that go into them). That’s why it’s especially exciting and interesting when some companies choose trade-offs that are far from balanced.

The Sigma Merrill DP cameras are one such “off the deep end” product.

The Merrill DP breaks a lot of camera rules. First off they use a completely unique sensor — the Foveon sensor — a sensor so different that there is no agreed on way to say how many megapixels it actually captures.

Secondly Sigma sells the Merrill with a fixed lens. Unusual in the camera market but not unheard of right? But wait! There are actually three different DP Merrill’s, each identical except for the fixed focal length lens attached. The established wisdom among photographers who change lenses at all (a dying breed) is that you should carry three focal lengths — a wide, medium and long — and that’s all you’ll ever need.

The Sigma DP Merrill has a better idea: buy three copies of the same camera with different lenses! Not as crazy as it sounds since many professional photographers know they don’t have time to fiddle with changing lenses and just carry multiple bodies instead. But for a consumer camera this was a particularly ballsy move. And at around $900 each you could buy all three and not have spent more than a lot of other systems with three lenses.

So of course I had to try. I rented the DP3 from LensRentals and it soon arrived (along with two batteries on account of the battery life being so short for these cameras — they aren’t kidding — charge and carry both!).

The rental unit had been set to record only jpegs, presumably because the only way to convert the raw Foveon files is with Sigma’s own, awkward, software. The jpegs were ok but I was not blown away. Once I realized that I wasn’t even shooting RAW things changed considerably.

Every negative thing you will read online about these cameras is true — they are slow, and awkward, and the ergonomics are sub par. But the images from the DP3 (which is a 75mm field of view) blew me away and had a look that is pretty unique.

The lenses on the Merrills combined with the Foveon (custom paired for each sensor after all) are bitingly sharp. And the colour rendition is a sort of dreamy, painterly like thing that’s hard to replicate with other systems. The best I can say in words is that the files feel both sharp and yet not clinical at the same time.

Next I tried converting the files to black and white and this was even more amazing.

Something about the Foveon sensor leads to especially snappy b&w conversions with little need to fiddle with the S-curve to increase contrast.

Sigma knows that these cameras are special and nearly unusable. They have gathered a faitful following of photographers who use them in spite of themselves. Sigma’s answer to that is the Sigma DP Quattro coming this summer.

I can hardly wait.