A pocket camera for DSLR shooters

Author's Rating:

Pros: Superlative lens, amazing sharpness and dynamic range

Cons: Sloooow. Short battery life. Annoying lens cap. Horrible bundled software. Poor performance at ISO 800

The Bottom Line: 
If you understand the limitations and can live with them, the DP1 will reward you with superlative images.

Author's Review
Many consumers fixate on megapixels as the sole measure of a camera's quality. This is actually a simplistic view, for more detail on why, read my article on the megapixel myth: http://www.majid.info/mylos/stories/2004/02/13/megapixel.html.

Digital SLRs offer high megapixels, but more importantly large sensors that offer clean, relatively noise-free images compared to pocket cameras. They also have high dynamic range, i.e. the ability to display scenes with sharply contrasting shadows and highlights without washing out. All but the worst SLR lenses will also outperform the vast majority of point-and-shoot lenses. The good news is that DSLRs have fallen dramatically in price, putting them in reach of almost all budgets. All else being equal, a $500 DSLR is much better value than a $400 supposedly high-end point-and-shoot camera like the Canon G10.

All else is not always equal, however. DSLRs do not fit in your jacket pocket. The old saying goes, the best camera is the one you have with you. In the old days of film, there were compact cameras like the inexpensive Olympus Stylus Epic or the posh Contax T3 that could give all but the highest-end SLRs a run for their money in terms of image quality. DSLR shooters have longed for a compact digicam with DSLR quality and that can be taken everywhere. For some odd reason, manufacturers have turned a deaf ear to this market demand. The Japanese manufacturer Sigma decided to innovate where the big names (Canon, Nikon, Sony) wouldn't.

Sigma is not as well known as the big three, but they are a major manufacturer of third-party lenses for the latter's systems. They also make a range of cameras including DSLRs. With the DP1, they essentially put the gits of a Sigma SD14, complete with a large sensor, into a compact body, and put a very high quality prime (non-zoom) lens in front of it. On paper, this should be a killer combination, but the reality is a mixed bag.

The camera itself is solidly built of metal. it is the size of a medium-sized pocket camera, albeit with a bulging lens housing in front. This brings us to the first ergonomic shortcoming of the camera: it has a detachable lens cap, that will only fit when it is precisely aligned with the camera. If you turn the camera on without removing it first, the lens will whir, bump against the lens cap and the camera will ask you to shut it off, remove the lens cap and turn it back on again, which gets old after a while.

The controls are unexceptional, neither less or more intuitive than any other compact, with too many fiddly buttons and menus. The user interface is certainly not as streamlined as that on a DSLR. It does have a little wheel for manual focus. Unfortunately that wheel is not damped and will rotate freely at the slightest nudge.

The camera does not have an optical viewfinder, but it has a hot shoe where you could place an accessory viewfinder. I didn't use the one supplied by Sigma, but instead a cheaper Voigtlander metal 28mm finder designed for Leica-style rangefinder cameras. The accessory VF makes the camera more cumbersome in the pocket, however. Another accessory is a plastic lens hood to cut down on flare. Unfortunately, it bulks up the camera even further and does not have its own lens cap, so it gets in the way more than anything else. If you are going to use a package that bulky, you might as well get a Panasonic G1 mini-DSLR.

Once you turn on the camera, you first impressions is that of a bad flashback to 2000 or so - incredibly sluggish user interface. The camera takes a ridiculous amount of time to focus, set exposure, take the photo and even more time to cycle through to the next exposure. Even compact cameras have improved their act in the last 9 years, this level of sloth is simply unacceptable.

Another strike against the DP1 is that batteries tend to self-discharge inside it. If you keep yours in your jacket pocket like I do with mine, you might get a nasty surprise when you pull it out and find out it has no juice left even though you took no pictures since the last time when the battery was full. When compared with the ridiculous battery life of my Fuji F31fd, measured in years, this is disappointing.

Most digital cameras lie about their specs. When you read about a 6 megapixel camera, what you are getting is a camera with 3 million green photodiodes, 1.5M red and 1.5M blue ones, not 6 million full-color sensors. The 6 million pixels are reconstructed by interpolating (guessing), a process that reduces sharpness and color fidelity. The DP1, as with Sigma's other cameras, uses an innovative sensor technology from a company called Foveon (since purchased by Sigma), where each pixel on the sensor has three sub-pixels  stacked vertically to sense red, green and blue light. The result is a much sharper image and better color fidelity. Unfortunately, Sigma felt the need to compete with the other manufacturers' deceitful megapixel numbers by claiming 14 megapixels. It's really a 5 megapixel camera, but one that offers very sharp pixels with precise colors.

With an APS-C size sensor, roughly half the size of a 35mm film frame, roughly the same size as almost all DSLRs under $2500, and eight times larger than most compact digicams, you would expect stellar performance in low light, where the large sensor can collect sufficient photons for a clean signal (unlike compact digicams that are essentially useless above ISO 400). Unfortunately, the complex vertical layout of the Foveon sensors reduces sensitivity, and the DP1 tops out at a relatively lacklustre (compared to DSLRs) ISO 800. The fact the lens is a relatively slow f/4 compounds this - the DP1 is not an available light camera.

Shooting a digicam in JPEG mode is like getting prints from film and tossing the negative - the sensor gets far more detail than a puny 8-bit JPEG can represent, and if you care about extracting that detail, you should shoot RAW. Sigma includes their Sigma Photo Pro software with the camera. Ditch it, it is absolutely horrible, unintuitie and slow, at least on the Mac. Adobe Lightroom has support for DP1 raw X3F files and does a much better job.

The lens is fixed - it won't zoom, you zoom in and out with your feet. This is a good thing, as primne lenses doe not need the optical compromises of zoom lenses and have much higher quality. It is the equivalent of a 28mm lens on 35mm film, i.e. a wide-angle lens covering a field of view of 65 degrees. I find 28mm is wider than I'd like. Sigma is soon releasing the DP2 which will have a 41mm equivalent lens.

The slow, wide-angle lens shows the camera is clearly designed as a tool for landscape photography in daylight. That said, most compact digicams do a decent job in the same conditions where the limitations of their sensors are not so apparent. What edge does the DP1 have in this respect? In short, absolutely stunning images. they are sharp, have no purple fringes or other color artifacts, no barrel or pincushion distortion whatsoever. The dynamic range puts entry-level DSLRs to shame, it's very hard to wash out a scene or end up with blocky shadows. The photos I took with my DP1 on my New Zealand honeymoon compare favorably with those I took with my $2500 Canon 5D and its $1200 28-70mm f/2.8L professional zoom lens.

In conclusion, this is a frustrating camera. On paper, the potential was immense, but the slowness and lacklustre high-ISO performance make it unsuitable as either a low-light camera or a "decisive moment" action camera. It is a camera for slow, thoughtful landscape photography, ideal for tourists, but nowhere as versatile as most cheaper entry-level DSLRs. If you can understand and live with its limitations, it will reward you with stunning image quality, but you have to hope future models will address the shortcomings before other manufacturers come up with competitive large-sensor compact camers. Olympus, Samsung or Panasonic have all announced such cameras. Once again, innovation does not come from the market leaders, but I would be surprised if they didn't have models cookling in their labs.