Sony A300 firmware flaws

[Tullio]

What if it did work? You will have to keep changing the settings over and over and over and over and over and over...and over again...every time you exit the preset. To me, that's worse. You can always assume that the default setting is either 0, normal or standard when looking at the EXIF data. So, going back to factory defaults should not be much of a problem but change the settings again and again, is (IMO).

[Furd]

I haven't loaded any of Sony's software for my A700. But, my guess is that it probably supports most of the Makernote tag info.

Jim
As a Linux user myself I was wondering what you use to process RAW from your Sony?
Furd

[TCav]

Tullio wrote:

What if it did work? You will have to keep changing the settings over and over and over and over and over and over...and over again...every time you exit the preset.

When I found a combination of settings that I liked, I (manually) transferred those settings to "A", where they remain to this day (with some minor tweaking.)

You use the tools you've got to get where you want to go. Each of two alternate settings might work well individually, but not in combination. Being able to start over is a good way to recover from that. And when you find a combination of alternate settings you like, you can reproduce them somewhere else where they don't get lost.

That's a feature, not a bug.

[JimC]

Jim
As a Linux user myself I was wondering what you use to process RAW from your Sony?
Furd

I'd try some of these. I sometimes run an image I plan on printing at a larger size through multiple converters (to see which one works best as a starting point, which tends to vary by image).

http://www.rawtherapee.com/ (free)

http://ufraw.sourceforge.net/ (free -- open source, available as stand alone and as a plugin for the Gimp).

http://www.bibblelabs.com (not free but very good, especially for higher ISO images, since it's Noise Ninja based noise reduction is nice)

http://www.lightcrafts.com/products/index.html (30 day trial available now for linux, but it probably won't be free)

digiKam is another product you may want to give a spin if you're running a KDE based distro (but, you'd need a newer version of it for a700 support). It's using it's own library based on dcraw.c now (libkdcraw). It's a really nice program for image management and the newer versions have improved a lot. I use it quite a bit for simple image editing tasks (cropping and resizing, sharpening, etc.)

http://www.digikam.org/

Krita (part of KOffice) is using dcraw.c for raw conversion (passing parameters to it for the conversion, based on your slider settings for noise reduction, white balance, etc.).

http://www.koffice.org/krita/

You can also use dcraw.c from command line if desired.

http://www.cybercom.net/~dcoffin/dcraw/

See this page for available options:

http://www.cybercom.net/~dcoffin/dcraw/dcraw.1.html

[Tullio]

TCav wrote:

When I found a combination of settings that I liked, I (manually) transferred those settings to "A", where they remain to this day (with some minor tweaking.)

I can't find a good software that provides a full description of the A300 EXIF data. Thus, it is almost impossible to determine all the settings that Sony engineers used when they designed each preset mode. For instance, on the Oly E510,Portrait mode had some very specific settings, not only in terms ofmetering mode, contrast, saturation and sharpness but alsoin terms of WB tone settings (Green, Blue, Magenta and Red). So, unless you knew how they had adjusted each of these colors, you'd not be able to fully reproduce the Portrait setting. Fortunately, there is a very good toolfor the Oly cameras called EXIFtool, written by Phil Harvey, which provides all sorts ofinformation from the camera's EXIF data tags. It gives you the default setting values of just about any setting you can think ofand what they changed to.Unfortunately, this program does not fully work with the A300 EXIF data. It provides someinfo. but not nearly as much and some of thefields, the data is inaccurate (i.e. I set saturation to -1 but the EXIF data extracted by the EXIFtool program indicated a value of 1 rather than -1, as it should be. The program is also not capable of reporting any setting beyond +2 (since the Oly only offers -2 to +2. So, if I setsharpness to +3, the program reports it as 0 (obviously assuming that a value of 3 is garbbage.

Oh well, I guess I'll just have to live with the limitation.

[TCav]

Tullio wrote:

TCav wrote:

I can't find a good software that provides a full description of the A300 EXIF data.

You go through the menues, write down the settings, switch to P, S, A, or M, and recreate them.

No fancy software; just a pencil and a piece of paper. You can type it into 'NotePad' if you want to.

[Furd]

Thanks Jim for the links, there is a lot here to digest.
I have very little experience with raw, now that everything has taken a quantum leap in speed I plan on making more use of it.
Furd

[kscharf]

Also rawstudio, which is a GUI interface to dcraw.

[mr.sneezy]

Tullio wrote:

This is my second day with the A300 and the list of negatives keeps growing. I found some firmware flaws (that's how I categorize it)that to meare very annoying. If you make any function change (Metering mode, DRO, etc..) to any of the preset modes, the camera will not save it. So, if you customize Landscape to DRO off for instance and then you either switch to a different mode or turn the camera off, when you go back to Landscape DRO is turned back on. Why? If I'm allowed to make changes to the preset modes, then the camera should retain the changes I made. If Sony thinks they know better, then they should disable Function settings for preset modes, period.

Don't know if Sony listens to feedback, but surely a quick fix is in the hands of the firmware writers.

Simply add an extra setup menu item. "Hold user Scene Mode edits = Yes" (or No)

Also add "Set all Scene mode edits to defaults = OK?"

Easy, everybody's happy...

Martin