DxO One: Liberté, egalité, insanité

My first DxO One (version 1, $125 new on clearance) bricked when I upgraded the firmware. Left with an inert toy while Amazon dug up another one to send me, I could not help but play with the dead one. I flew it up to the water/ice dispenser on the refrigerator. “Open the pod bay doors, HAL.” Nothing.  The DxO One rotated 180 degrees so that it could eject the micro SD card into the…

“Dad, what are you doing?”

“Uh… nothing.”

But seriously, the DxO One is one of strangest and most wonderful cameras to come out of France, or anywhere. Here’s why.

Sensor. The camera uses a 20Mp,  1″ Backside Illuminated (BSI) sensor (3x or so crop factor) made by Sony, the same one as on the RX100III. Two things make this a standout here: first, BSI sensors are quite good – meaning this returns results almost on par with the Sony a6300’s copper-wire conventional sensor. Second, almost all sensors perform equally at base ISO. In the software design, DxO biases the camera toward lower ISOs and wider apertures (which makes sense, since a 1″ sensor starts diffracting at f/5.6).

How does this compare to an iPhone XS sensor? Well, it’s almost 70% more resolution and 6.7x times the surface area (116mm² x 17.30mm²). Do the math. All the computations in the Apple world can’t make up for this type of difference in displacement. This does expose the genius of portrait mode, though – because not even a 1″ sensor is big enough to have easy-to-achieve subject isolation.

The sensor is used for contrast-detect AF (with face priority).

Lens. 32mm equivalent, f/1.8-11 aperture, six groups, six elements, with some of the weirdest aspherical shapes imaginable. It’s very tough to find a lens on a compact camera that approximates a 35/1.8. But here you are.

Far from being telecentric with an expected “folded optics” path, the DxO One uses the cellphone method with almost zero distance between the rearmost element  and the sensor. The rearmost element looks like a brassiere. Like this:

The lens is happiest at larger apertures (f/2-f/4).

Storage. The DxO One accepts standard MicroSD cards. I was able to test up to 128Gb cards  (Samsung EVO Plus), and it is able to read and write to them with no issues.

Power. Power comes from an internal battery but can also be fed directly from a micro USB cable. The battery takes about two hours to charge and does about 200 shots. Version 2 of the camera has a removable back door to accommodate an external battery pack DxO no longer sells. You also lose the free software (see below).

Viewfinder. Your choice of two. You can plug the camera into your iPhone, where you can use the DxO One application and the phone screen as a viewfinder. Alternatively, version 3.3 of the camera firmware turns the little OLED screen on the back into a square contour viewfinder, good enough at least to frame the middle square of the picture – and surprisingly good at estimating a level angle for the camera. You could also split the difference with a Lightning extension cord.

Connectivity. The camera was originally designed to connect via the Lightning port, but DxO enabled the onboard WiFi so that now you can use the application on the phone and control the camera (including view-finding) without a physical connection. The DxO One can also connect to your phone via your home wireless network. WiFi operation – no matter what the camera or phone – is not as much fun as it first sounds – which is why the DxO product is more flexible than Sony’s wireless-only solutions.

Software. In terms of the camera’s software, all the magic is under the hood. The camera switches on by sliding open the front cover (slide it all the way, and the Lightning connector will erect itself). There is a two-stage shutter button on the top and you can swipe up and down on the OLED to switch between controls and viewfinder and left and right to toggle photo and video. The camera stays on the exposure mode last selected from the DxO software on the iPhone.

The DxO One phone app is well-done and responsive. You can use it to frame, shoot the picture, and control what you want. Features include:

• JPG, Raw, and Super Raw (stacked) exposure modes.
• Single-shot, timer, and time-lapse settings
• Flash settings
• Subject modes and the usual PSAM modes.
• Program shift (between equivalent exposures with different shutter speeds or apertures).
• Single AF, Continuous AF, On-Demand AF, and Manual focus (manual includes an automatic hyperfocal calculation if desired).
• Matrix, centerweighted, or spot metering.
• Grid compositional overlay.
• “Lighting,” which is like a mini HDR compressor for JPGs.

You can also look through the exposures on the camera/card and move them to your phone as desired. As noted above, though, you do need to initiate wireless connections with the camera connected.

If you get a version 1 camera, new, it also comes with DxO Optics Pro 10 Elite (now Photo Lab 1 Elite) and DxO Filmpack Elite. But you have to be able to document that you are the original owner of the camera. Both of these can run as standalones or can be external editors for Lightroom. Photo Lab 1 is also capable of replacing Lightroom.

If you get version 2, you’re out of luck. But you do get a 4gb SD card and the detachable back door for that battery pack.

And either way, you do get DxO OpticsPro 10 for DxO One, which gives you a nice imaging/digital asset manager that can composite SuperRaw files. SuperRaw is a stack of four successive (and extremely rapid) exposures that cancel out high ISO noise.

And if you don’t like any of that, the DxO One outputs normal DNG files that you can simply edit to taste in Lightroom. There is a Lightroom profile for the camera’s minimal residual distortion.

Ergonomics. This is the one place where things are sketchy. It’s hard to hold onto a small ovoid object, especially one with a button on the top. I would highly recommend a wrist strap.

Upshot. Maybe not the most compelling camera at $700 plus when it came out, but now that it is a sixth of that and still a lot of fun to shoot, go for it!

 

Digital photography – really photography?

Can you believe that Pullman is used for “bus” in parts of Europe? Jeez, I thought that a pullman was inherently a rail vehicle. How dare usages change! Somebody get on the Rail Transport User’s Group (RTUG) and post a philosophy question. We need to take the name Pullman back!

But really, how many hours of the waning days of old men’s lives have been wasted arguing about whether newfangled cameras grabbing electrons can be “photography” as an art or a craft? How many should? Would that time be better spent arguing about cars, finishing, guns, boats, or wristwatches?

You can spin off into the etymological argument: electrons aren’t photo + graphy because the light is not making the image directly. Or there is transformation. Or something. Reliance on ancient Greek is misguided. Photography was a neologism invented in the 19th century. It was not true to the ancient Greek then (no thing was – or is – drawing or scratching in the sense of γραφή); the 19th-century term was just an arbitrary description for what happens when light was the prime mover in the imaging process. And we have legions of words whose meanings have deviated far from what they would have meant to Greeks or Romans – or even what they meant the first time the terms were coined. Hence the weird crossover between autobuses and rail cars.

Is photography art? If you believe that, look at what the art world says. It’s all photography. That’s what museums call anything that is an image captured by a machine (film or digital) where the substantive content originates in the original image recording process. The only distinction made (and only sometimes) is for pre-silver-halide work, and even then only if it is one of the more obviously exotic (Daguerrotypes, Cyanotypes, and other things that deviate from the look of optical or inkjet paper). Odd that they don’t care what system originated the image; they only care about the medium it is ultimately expressed. Just like other things you see on the walls are “oil,” “watercolor,” “pastel,” “drawing,” etc. A “dye diffusion print” does not differentiate between originating on negatives or a Handycam.

Or maybe it’s not odd. Art requires a visible or tangible expression, and in the end, that is all that counts.

 

Take a stress pill: dual memory cards

The Nikon Z7 is undoubtedly a quantum leap in Nikon’s camera evolution, essentially putting the best features of the Dxx series into a mirrorless body. Yet there is the inevitable complaint: “No dual card slot? Only one? No pro camera is like that!”

Pardon me, but plenty of pro cameras have been like that – and not just pro digital cameras in some benighted past (n.b., an era ending maybe 4 years ago). Consider the D2x and D700. Anyone want to call those “not pro” cameras? How about the flagships of the EOS fleet for a stretch?

In an era where film ruled the waves, it’s not like you could put two films into the same camera simultaneously for “backup.” And back then, pictures were scarcer and more valuable, and your chances of losing a shot due to a light leak, film defect, or development failure were astronomically high compared to anything that could befall a digital outfit.

So let’s move to digital. What is the measured malfunction rate of properly kept, brand-named CF, SD, or XQD cards? Hint: it’s astronomically low compared to the failure rate of the cameras that use them (SanDisk posts an MTBF of 1 million hours, or 114 years). Here are things that are far more likely to happen:

• Dying (which is all but guaranteed within the MTBF cited)
• Being killed in a car crash
• Being hit by lightning
• Finding a lost cousin on some genealogy site
• Winning Powerball

The threat of a bad flash card bringing down the system is simply not a real thing for most people. Dropping a camera, having a battery burn out, or suffering some physical mishap is far more likely. Even being in a car accident is more likely. And for that matter, why wouldn’t “any responsible pro” bring an extra car? An extra photographer?

I suspect that many of the people complaining about this issue — if not simply fronting to front — are semi-pros who scraped up every last dime to buy one really good camera to shoot wedding pictures. Fair enough. Maybe they had a bad experience with a counterfeit card once. Abused a good one. Ran one into the ground. It’s also possible to screw up the file system of a card by failing to respect buffers that are still clearing or repeatedly using without ever doing an in-camera format.

But this group is not positioned to speak for all pros (i.e., make the statement that “no pro would…”). Real pros in every field use redundancy – and it’s not limited to using two cards in the same camera (which does nothing if your camera is the single point of failure). Redundancy could include:

• Using smaller cards to reduce the “all eggs in one basket” effect. 32Gb is fine. Smaller media is one of the reasons that film was safe; 36 frames on a roll of film is small.
• Rotating between cards over the course of the shoot (the nice thing about EXIF is that Lightroom can combine shots from multiple cards into exactly the right order).
• Using two cameras and two cards, which means you will never be high and dry.
• Beaming your images in real time using wireless (a Toshiba Flashair is great for this, though there is no XQD version yet).
• Downloading one card to your laptop while shooting a second card.

When you consider the other options, thinking that two cards in a camera would get you off the hook seems a little odd, does it not?

Maybe the whole “multiple card slot” thing is a product of general societal economic insecurity. Or a “mine is bigger than yours” mindset. But any way you slice it, it doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense for most people.