PMW-F3 Aliasing and Moire.

I’ve been testing and playing with my F3 and first off let me say this… I love this camera, it produces amazing images and I can play with lots of lenses!

But, it’s not all roses. The F3 suffers from aliasing. A zone plate shows extensive aliasing. Until today this had not caused any concerns as I had seen little evidence of it in actual footage, but when shooting some brick houses this afternoon I came across some coloured moire patterns appearing as faint coloured stripes across the brickwork in the footage. It’s not anywhere near as bad as a DSLR, my wife looked at the footage and didn’t notice it until I pointed it out to her, but it’s certainly there. This is disappointing on a camera at this price level, my EX1 doesn’t do this. Now the zone plate shows this to be an issue with the cut off of the optical low pass filter, so I doubt that there is much that can be done in the firmware, but then Sony have done some clever stuff in the past with firmware updates. When working on my picture profile settings I did find that increasing detail above -15 would increase the visibility of the aliases on the zone plate, however when I tested various detail settings with the brickwork there was little difference. I think Nigel Cooper has also seen this, but I’ve not seen it mentioned anywhere else. Has anyone else observed this?

One thought on “PMW-F3 Aliasing and Moire.”

  1. mm, maybe related with the relatively low (for HD output) number of effective photosites on the sensor? I understand that the F3 sensor contains 3.36 million effective photosites; this correspond to ~2.4K horizontal resolution. For comparison, Arri Alexa’s horizontal resolution is ~2.8K.

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