Epic, Cats and Hawk-C's at ISO 2500.

[Björn Benckert]

I Did a low light test with the epic with the new beta 4 firmware and our Hawks at home, nothing scientific, just tried to catch the cat's actions in front of the TV couch. All lenses where wide open, used a 360deg shutter and ISO was set to 2500. Amazing to see how little noise there is. At full 5k ana the picture only got a subtile noise that to me looks like the best "digital film grain" I ever seen, and down sampled to HD the uncompressed picture is super slick. No noise reduction and no sharpening was used.

Here is a link to a full 5k jpg frame, click on the actuall image to see it 1:1: http://www.syndicate.se/Files/~usr/hawk/cats1.jpg

And here is a compressed vimeo feed, still looks very good in full frame:

Love the new beta, the hawks and most of all our cats

 

[Kwan Khan]

Nice

 

[Björn Benckert]

Here are some more stills.
Obviously it falls apart a bit when I try to color balance the stuff, as our home is lit pretty far from daylight...

here is a 5600k: http://www.syndicate.se/Files/~usr/hawk/cats3.jpg
and here is the same pic with 2400k where all the carrot colored light is cut out, then off course the noise comes out quite hard: http://www.syndicate.se/Files/~usr/hawk/cats4.jpg

To me thats usually what went wrong when people complain about noise, which is odd. As if all the available light is heavily tinted then removing it in grading does not leave much to play with in the lowlight regions.

Here is another one, I love, the oddities and dof of the Hawks, this is a 50mm at f2.0. and the dof is really showing even when the focus is set quite far: http://www.syndicate.se/Files/~usr/hawk/cats2.jpg

 

[PatrickFaith]

These are Great ... love it.

 

[Will Keir]

alright, love your cats too! Thanks for the post.

 

[Justin Kirchhoff]

Clean. The noise looks beautiful and very palatable.

 

[Björn Benckert]

Clean. The noise looks beautiful and very palatable.

Yes, I'm not sure, I did not do any proper tests, but it almost makes me think that the whole blackshading thing is different in beta 4, is it?
I mean it takes less time now and such so I guess it's done differently, and to me those pix look's better than i can remember at ISO 2500, or?
Would be great if it's improvements made to it not just time savings on the process.

 

[Ryan De Franco]

Bjorn you have a very nice little cat clan going there. We also let our cat destroy a little corner of the couch!

I am so used to clicking absently on cat videos I missed the part about ISO 2500. Didn't notice on full screen throughout. I think draining the color does terrible things not just to the noise ("grain structure") but to the mood and feel. The video felt like a nice warm house. It all depends on how it's presented, mood and tone... I'm sure I'm not the only one who likes to mix practicals and sub-2K lamps dimmed to 70!

+1 if you love tungsten and cats!