I saw this discussed on another forum where it turned into a complete bun-fight and brand war...
I thought the point was that the discussion is pointless as most see exactly what they want to see rather than being objective. Show them a blind test and they make different choices to when you present the same photos against brands, photographers are driven by a desire to believe and re-inforce that they made the correct purchasing choice rather than see subtle differences.
It was interesting in that it clearly showed that most don't look objectively but view with prejudice, seek only to confirm a pre-formed opinion. If nobody really looks properly and nobody understands that they can't separate what they wish to see from what is actually there then it renders most opinion on Photo forums as subjective.
It also raises another interesting question, and points out a contradiction; if the camera manufacturers did make a camera with perceptually accurate colours would anybody notice or even prefer it? As we generally gravitate to more *punch* then we also generally tend to prefer cameras that produce more punchy photos. Would we then consider those photos to have more accurate colour simply because we want to believe that it is?
This raises the contradiction, because we don't see colour correctly and demand punchier photos with neural skin tones then the whole exercise becomes a subjective one about matching our expectations and bias and has little to do with science or accuracy at all.
It also shows that the effective color for raw data is basically the same between all the major brands now. The difference in color science has more to do with the manufacturer's interpretation and the jpeg processing engine in the camera. Which makes sense when almost everyone except Canon uses a Sony sensor.
To me this makes the lens ecosystem even more critical and more valuable than the camera sensor or the camera body. It's going to be an interesting next few years.
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I'd say Tim's synopsis is pretty much on target. I'm not a Tony Northrup fan either but I got a good chuckle out of this one (and I'm a Fuji user!). Needless to say as often as he used the term "color science" in the video not a single second of that 22 minutes had anything remotely to do with science.
This topic is both interesting and often hilariously contentious because of three facts that we do know from the science of human perception.
1. As human animals we posses very acute color discriminatory capability. We can see very minor and very subtle differences between colors when presented with them side by side.
2. Human color memory is somewhere south of abysmal. We simply can not remember that a color is or is not the color we saw previously when the color we saw previously is no longer viewable.
3. Any photographer will vehemently insist that fact #2 above doesn't apply to them.
Therefore to introduce this topic to an audience of photographers is to invite as Tim called it a "complete bun-fight."
Differences in the JPEG renderings of the various camera brands are real and we can take the same photo with camera A and B and view the two images side by side and see that they are different. We can identify the differences we see with specificity and express a preference one over the other. And then presented with a blind test of a dozen each random photos from both camera A and B we will be completely incapable of selecting which is which. It's how we're wired and there's not much we can do about that. We can discriminate side by side variation but can't remember "Canon colors" versus "Nikon colors" versus "Fuji colors" to be able to select them in a blind test.
The mechanism at work that has so many photographers believing otherwise is self-deception. A photographer has heard from other photographers about the wonderful "Fuji colors" and buys a Fuji camera. This new Fuji camera owner then runs out and takes some test photos and while viewing the results exclaims, "Oh yeah! I love these Fuji colors!"
n614cd -- very perceptive comment about lens systems. When I was learning the trade my mentor taught me how to buy camera hardware. He said to me one day when we were doing some shopping, "Lenses take pictures, cameras hold film." When I made the switch to Fuji about 5 years ago it was because I found the lenses I wanted. I was new to Fuji and immediately curious about all the "Fuji colors" and "Fuji film sims" talk that I encountered on all the Fuji dedicated sites. My take was that they were all behaving as described in the previous paragraph. So I did a little Tony Northrup testing myself. On one of the forums dedicated to Fuji I created a new forum user. At the time I had an XE-2 which was released before Fuji introduced their CC film simulation. My new user participated in the forum and then when the XE-2 got a firmware update that included the new CC film sim I posted a collection of photos under the title "XE-2 -- Love the new CC film sim!" What I said I did was go back to some favorite raw files and re-processed them with the CC sim. Here they were and they were great! The rest of the forum gave me some thumbs up and pats on the back and re-affirmed how miraculous that CC film sim was. The photos I posted however were SOOC JPEGs from a Samsung point and shoot. I made sure they included blue skies because if there's any extremes in the Fuji world of "Fuji color" its the sky color rendering of the CC and Velvia film simulations which are so far from realistic that we should be able to at least notice that something is very wrong.
What to say about this I'm not too sure. It befuddled Tony. I think it's appropriate for a photographer who wants to use camera JPEGs to test the different brands and in side by side comparisons make a decision about what s/he prefers and allow that to influence their camera choice. What's hilarious about that however is that if you sneaked into their studio some night and replaced their camera JPEG processor with a Sony BIONZ processor they probably wouldn't notice. If six months later you told them you did it they'd swear all along they thought something was wrong with their camera.
Joe
