Roger_Cavanagh
20th of August 2002 (Tue), 17:58
Has anyone done a systematic comparison of these two converters? I mean wrt image quality rather than UI and other stuff.
I decided to cough up the reg fee. There are a few people, like Taz, who hang around here who have mentioned they use YP, and I came across a head-to-head review that rated BB ahead on most things except image quality. They gave 5 stars to YP and only 3 to BB.
The USP for YP is the ARF filters. Having read the draft documentation for YP, I decided to take a close look at ARF2. I take 99% of my pictures with ISO 100/200, and this was the recommendation for best image quality.
I've been running assorted images through BB and YP, producing linear TIFF files and processing using LinearSharpen (actually LinearSharpenMenu, of which more later). I was intending to produce a formal review article for rogercavanagh.com, but found it difficult to set up comparison images that would show real differences when posted to the web. So I'm posting these subjective and somewhat tentative conclusions to see what you all out there have found.
Colour: there is a definite difference in colour. There's more red in the BB image and a bit more vibrancy/brightness.
Noise: there is much less noise/artefacts in the YP images. This is especially noticeable in shadows and blurred, out of focus backgrounds.
Sharpening: we're all used to high levels of USM causing the noise to be increased to unacceptable levels. It seemed to me that the YP images (presumably because of the ARF effect on artefacts) could accept higher levels of sharpening than the BB images without affecting the noise so much. This was easier to see, if images were upsized.
Related to this, as I said, I was using LSM to process the images. Regular users of LS342 will know that it has a high quality option, which includes an upsize-downsize step to reduce jaggies. One of the refinements I added with LSM was a third quality option. This does the upsize in increments (stair interpolation). Using this Q3 option adds signficantly to image processing time, and its benefit is not apparent on every image, but sometimes the improved image detail is noticeable. I processed a number of images using this option. It seems to me that such images - both BB and YP conversions - can also accept a higher degree of sharpening before noise becomes unacceptable.
Obviously, these judgements are subjective and I'm only working with screen images at the moment, but I'd be interested to read the views of anyone else who has compared BB and YP.
Regards,
I decided to cough up the reg fee. There are a few people, like Taz, who hang around here who have mentioned they use YP, and I came across a head-to-head review that rated BB ahead on most things except image quality. They gave 5 stars to YP and only 3 to BB.
The USP for YP is the ARF filters. Having read the draft documentation for YP, I decided to take a close look at ARF2. I take 99% of my pictures with ISO 100/200, and this was the recommendation for best image quality.
I've been running assorted images through BB and YP, producing linear TIFF files and processing using LinearSharpen (actually LinearSharpenMenu, of which more later). I was intending to produce a formal review article for rogercavanagh.com, but found it difficult to set up comparison images that would show real differences when posted to the web. So I'm posting these subjective and somewhat tentative conclusions to see what you all out there have found.
Colour: there is a definite difference in colour. There's more red in the BB image and a bit more vibrancy/brightness.
Noise: there is much less noise/artefacts in the YP images. This is especially noticeable in shadows and blurred, out of focus backgrounds.
Sharpening: we're all used to high levels of USM causing the noise to be increased to unacceptable levels. It seemed to me that the YP images (presumably because of the ARF effect on artefacts) could accept higher levels of sharpening than the BB images without affecting the noise so much. This was easier to see, if images were upsized.
Related to this, as I said, I was using LSM to process the images. Regular users of LS342 will know that it has a high quality option, which includes an upsize-downsize step to reduce jaggies. One of the refinements I added with LSM was a third quality option. This does the upsize in increments (stair interpolation). Using this Q3 option adds signficantly to image processing time, and its benefit is not apparent on every image, but sometimes the improved image detail is noticeable. I processed a number of images using this option. It seems to me that such images - both BB and YP conversions - can also accept a higher degree of sharpening before noise becomes unacceptable.
Obviously, these judgements are subjective and I'm only working with screen images at the moment, but I'd be interested to read the views of anyone else who has compared BB and YP.
Regards,