S414 8/12 bit conversion problem

[Salsa]

Minolta advertises and states in the manual that it has 12 bit conversions. I only get 8 bits as reported by Minolta's Dimage program and Photoshop. Minolta's tech people said send it back for repair.

How many bits do you get in TIF and Superfine modes?

Don

[brian1208]

Looking at Giff's post above it appears that TIFF saves in 16 bit (so on the 414 should be 12 bit?) whereas JPEG saves in 8 bit (which agrees with what you are seeing. So maybe its down to the file format?

[NHL]

There's nothing wrong with the camera...

Minolta advertises and states in the manual that it has 12 bit conversions. I only get 8 bits as reported by Minolta's Dimage program and Photoshop. Minolta's tech people said send it back for repair.

How many bits do you get in TIF and Superfine modes?

This is how all cameras work and not just the s414:

1. The CCD is 12/14-bit resolution of monochrome Red, Green, andBlue pixels (ie a 1/3 of the sensor is sensitive to each color!). Some Nikon cameras will capture in complementary color with a 4th luminance channel, but the idea is the same...

2. After the picture is taken the camera processes thoses individual monochrome pixel to a color pixel by interpolation and where the resulting round-off occurs (ie 12-bit -> 8-bit), but now you have 24-bit color at 8-bit for every pixel: (8-bit,8-bit,8-bit). The same as the sRGB monitor standard (256x256x256) ie 16.777 million colors.

3. While some cameras can output 16-bit TIFF, ie 48-bit color depth (16-bit,16-bit,16-bit), most cameras don't and this includes the s414 or the D7/D7i/D7hi for that matter. Beside Photoshop would have choked on it or will only run with limited functions. -> TIFF from most cameras is also output @ the more universal 8-bit resolution, but 24-bit color depth. The file size would have been even more humongous @ 16-bit with not much gain (ie you can't display it and Photoshop can't take it in its entirety)!

The Sigma's Foveon sensor is the only exception and will capture color @ every pixels... :lol:

[Salsa]

Thank you for your very informative answer.
I came to that conclusion after reading some other literature and talking to the Minolta tech guys. After having them tell me to send it in for repair, I called back and told them my conclusion, they huddled and said OK.

Edit:

I also concluded that a 5 mp stored picture is essentially the same as a 5/3 mp picture interpolated back up to 5 m pixles. But this is much better than a 5/3 mp picture taken with a 5/3 mp camera. Where can I find results on pictues stored at different sizes to verify this theory?

Don