Note: following further testing I've tweaked the report below, as (0%) ETTR seems to work fine with the 4K experimental FRSP.
Last week, on April Fools’ Day, A1ex over on the Magic Lantern forum announced another ‘game changing’ addition to ML: namely 4K video: albeit only on the 5D3.
Last week, on April Fools’ Day, A1ex over on the Magic Lantern forum announced another ‘game changing’ addition to ML: namely 4K video: albeit only on the 5D3.
At first, as a 5D3, non-video, photographer, I wasn’t that excited, until I saw that in addition to all the sexy video stuff, this latest development, which is still at the experimental stage, contained a feature to allow silent, full resolution (5796x3870) DNG capture at any shutter speed.
Silent, meaning no mechanical shutter action, results in a truly silent DSLR, ie no mirror or shutter noise. Think of the use cases, eg in the middle of a church service or a concert.
At the moment ML has a full resolution silent feature, but the fastest shutter speed is about a 1/4 second. The 4K developments appear to eliminate the shutter limitation, albeit with a ‘rolling shutter’ limitation of about 0.128ms. This means that you will/may see strange geometry distortions in fast moving objects that stretch over a large part of the sensor, eg helicopter rotor blades.
As I say above, it’s all very experimental at the moment, but stable enough for testing. As an example of what is to come, I went and took a test shot in our garden. I used an exposure of F4.5, 1/1000s at ISO100! This exposure was simply not accessible to silent before.
I captured the test image as a DNG (at this stage no EXIF data is recorded), and ingested into Lightroom. I used a linear camera calibration preset I had previously set up via Adobe DNG Profiler, which I believe helps extract the highlights, and ‘played around’ with a few LR sliders. The resulting silent, full resolution image looks like this:
This is all very exciting stuff and once (hopefully) A1ex and the gurus at ML get it all working together, we will have full resolution silent photography working with Dual-ISO, ETTR, Auto-Bracketing and accessible in Lua. So expect the price of used 5D3s to start going up!
As things develop over at ML I’ll continue testing and posting.
