Sigma SD14

Never ones to let our readers down, we’ve secured a ‘First Look’ at the latest model from Sigma, the SD14.  

If you read the hype surrounding the newest incarnation of the Foveon X3 sensor, you can imagine that somewhere in the smoked glass towers of Nikon, Canon, Fujifilm and the like, there are people in suits with worried expressions that see this technology as the seven-headed beast from Revelation, threatening to spoil the party and offer digital SLR buyers something truly unique. But can it deliver what it promises? Or will it become the camera equivalent of our office fax machine that has a passion for turning important documents into origami animals?

We already know that new technology sometimes comes to the market before it has been properly sorted, and it’s interesting that Sigma delayed the launch of this camera in order to iron out a few problems it experienced during the testing of the pre-production models. The new SD14 is priced at £1,099, although with a street price of £999, it’s thrust straight into Fujifilm S5 Pro and Nikon D200 territory. From our recent experiences with the S5 Pro, the SD14 will have to pull the rabbit from the hat in order to succeed in this cutthroat sector.

Sigma claims that the Foveon technology, in which an incredible 14 million effective pixels are split over three sensor layers to capture the individual colours (red, green, blue), has the potential to deliver better colour and images that look and feel more natural compared to the single layer sensors already on offer that interpolate colour. Indeed, the previous SD9 and SD10 were capable of results to make the larger companies sit up and take notice. They did have issues though, and it’s perhaps because of these issues that neither could be described as a runaway success.

Pick up the SD14 for the first time and the camera sits very nicely in your hand, with a solid feel to the construction. The switch gear is well laid out and the controls are generally easy to access; changing the various camera settings is pretty straightforward. Start-up time isn’t exactly instant, taking about a second or so, and from Sleep mode it can take a couple of seconds to spring back into life. But once up and running, the camera feels responsive and everything works as it should. When half-pressing the shutter, the focus lock is quick and accurate. In low-light conditions, the focus-assist light also does a good job, working effectively, even in almost complete darkness. Tellingly, the Control dial offers only four modes of operation: Program AE, Aperture Priority, Shutter Priority and Manual. The exclusion of any pre-programmed scene modes reveals who Sigma thinks will be buying this camera: the serious amateur or indeed the professional.

Before we even get to the quality of the results from the camera, we need to point out that the SD14 has a serious handicap: the rear screen. It’s a generous 2.5-inch LCD, so nothing unusual there. However, when you press the shutter and eagerly await the results of your carefully thought-out composition and then check the histogram, what greets you is a bit of a surprise to say the least. The histogram itself is far too small and very difficult to read. There are a couple of reasons for this. First, Sigma has used a 150,000-pixel screen, which compares to 230,000 on, say, a Nikon D200 or Fujifilm S5 Pro. Second, there’s only one option of histogram, which is the proper RGB version. While it provides more information on the exposure of each channel, Sigma has decided to use thin coloured lines on a black background that makes accurate exposures difficult to establish, particularly in outside light, as we discovered in our tests. As a result of this, we were frequently unsure as to whether or not we had a good exposure and therefore uncertain of any adjustment required to correct things. This is a major disappointment on a camera of this calibre and price. Even the entry-level Nikon D40 has a much better LCD screen than this, and its histogram display is one of the easiest to read from any manufacturer.

Sigma has sensibly provided a highlight warning control. This is shown as red dots on your image that outline the clipped area. But again, due to the blocky nature of the display, trying to read this accurately outdoors is almost impossible. We even used the latest version of firmware, which according to the Sigma website, is designed to address the poor quality of the display. We can’t understand why Sigma has allowed such a low-resolution screen to be used on a camera of this price. The assumption must be that a lower-resolution LCD screen costs less to produce.

The instant review of an image takes between three and four seconds to appear after the shutter has been depressed, which isn’t exactly class-leading. However, other areas of camera control were excellent and the dedicated ISO, WB and image quality menu gave instant access to some frequently used adjustments.

You can probably tell that overall, the capture process wasn’t a wholly satisfying experience, which really is a shame as there are many things to like and admire about the camera’s handling. The viewfinder is bright and the shooting information provided is consistently clear and easy to read. The SD14’s metering was also pretty accurate, although we couldn’t really verify this until we returned to upload our images to view them in the supplied Sigma Photo Pro software. If you shoot RAW, you’ll have to use this, as although the brilliant Adobe Lightroom can open the Sigma’s X3F RAW files, there were some issues with inaccurate colours – so stick with Photo Pro. It’s no hardship really, as Sigma’s software has an excellent interface and is pretty intuitive to use. Very quickly, you can get your images ready to print or for some fine-tuning in Photoshop.

It would be fair to say that the results from the SD14 were a mixed bag of images that would make you say ‘wow’ out loud at times, and disappoint at others due to noise, and consequently, blotches of false colour. If the conditions are right – and by that we mean, good light, with no heavy shadow detail to recover – then the SD14 can produce images that have the potential to take your breath away. However, if you have medium to heavy underexposed shadow areas that the excellent Photo Pro software has to recover, then things move rapidly towards disappointment. A quick look at the pixel level reveals blotches of false colours, generated by noise. It’s a tightrope you have to walk with the SD14. There’s also an in-camera generated problem, which can occur when you shoot in JPEG. We queried this with Sigma, and the company confirmed that if you shoot in the JPEG format and have the camera contrast set to anything higher than zero, then in certain conditions an anomaly will occur around areas of strong highlights, manifesting as coloured pixels of blue, magenta and yellow.

By contrast, the SD14 does a very credible job of holding onto highlight detail, and perhaps there’s an argument for slightly overexposing the image to reduce the risk of shadow noise and then recover the highlights in software. The problem with that particular technique is that given the existing rear screen handicap and the difficult-to-read histogram, doing it accurately is something of a challenge.

It is one of those confidence-eroding scenarios, where you can forgive perhaps one of the issues, for example the LCD screen, but when you’re presented with a combination of handling and image quality niggles, you do start to question both the value and the viability. Make no mistake that when the SD14 gets things right, the results really are superb. The colours are excellent, with image sharpness and surface textures that look very three-dimensional. You can start to understand what Sigma has been banging on about in relation to the 14-megapixel Foveon sensor. The technology does indeed offer something special; it’s just that it perhaps needs more developing to iron out some of the issues.

We really wanted to like the SD14, as it has great potential and in many ways, we enjoyed using it. It’s easy to understand the theory behind the technology and when you see what it’s capable of producing, you’ll be very impressed. The difficulty is that to produce these results without the introduction of other artefacts means that you have to work a lot harder than you would with, say, an S5 Pro or a D200. For similar money, these cameras can produce outstanding results over a variety of conditions and ISO settings. The overall handling experience of the camera is too much of a chore, and it’s for this reason that we feel the SD14 is both too expensive and possibly a little lacking in development. When it produces the goods, it makes Ronaldo look like a Sunday league player, but when it misses the mark, the unsinkable ship has clearly hit an iceberg.