L16 Camera – Take Two, too

I was continuing to work/play with my Light L16 camera after my most recent post of a few days ago. I’m still curious about it and how to make it work better for my needs. And then, I made a little discovery that had me feeling that I could be in trouble. I don’t leave the WiFi turned on on the L16 because I suspect that it’s an additional source of battery drain. I treat many of my digital devices like this when battery drain is a concern. Since I didn’t have the WiFi automatically enabled, I also wasn’t automatically checking for software upgrades for the L16 camera. Uh oh!  When I turned the WiFi on the L16 and checked to see if there was an upgrade available, there was. So, I upgraded the software shortly after I published my last post and then had to wait until I could get out and test the images again.

 

As with my previous post, I’ve created a folder from which you may download the “raw” L16 files for your editing pleasure.  This time, I’ve put the folder onto my Photoshelter account because I’m running out of space in my Dropbox account. The link to my Photoshelter account is embedded here. Remember that each of these files is about 170 megabytes, so you likely don’t want to download the whole gallery. The download password for the gallery is L16. Lastly, my Photoshelter account doesn’t accept Light’s proprietary file format, so I’ve had to change the suffix from .lri to .raw to get the system to accept the files. Thus, you’ll need to change the suffix back to .lri after you’ve downloaded the files if you wish to view and edit those image files with Lumen.

 

I went on another walk today, similar to the one I did a few days ago – to the park and wetland. The bad news is that the temperature has dropped about 30 degrees F since my last walk. I’m not going to go into a whole lot of detail about my walk or shooting. I’m just going to quickly post some images, along with their details. Hopefully, if you read my previous post, this scene looks familiar. Also, as in my previous post, you should be able to “click” on the images and they’ll open in a separate tab.

 

 

Next, here’s some detail on the stalks on the left, similar to last time:

 

In some ways, it appears that there’s a bit better detail in the background portions of the image, but there’s still a lot of fuzziness in the area around the stalk. And, for whatever reason, the stalk is more fuzzy in this shot. These issues may be for just this photograph, but I don’t know. The aperture is at f/15.2 and the camera automatically chose its focus point.

 

Here’s a version of the whole image where the edges have been detected in the file:

 

It appears possible to pick out the fuzziness around the stalks on the left side of the image. Following is the same scene, but at 28 mm:

 

 

Stalk detail:

 

Same basic issues as above – decent background detail, fuzziness around the stalk. Following is the same scene at 70mm:

 

 

Good background detail, fuzzy stalk detail and around the stalk. Again, I don’t know why the stalk is not in focus – did I miss the focus point? – the areas right around the stalk should be in focus like the rest of the background when I’m shooting at f/15, I would expect.

 

A generally busy scene from the woods at 70mm focal length followed by a cropped portion to show the details:

Again, the details are fuzzy at 100% crop.

 

Next image, at 28mm, followed by a bit of detail at 100% crop:

 

 

In the detail, the left side of the image has fairly decent detail and sharpness, but the middle and right side are fuzzy. That’s just not acceptable.

 

Lastly, I shot this scene, into the sun. In the last post, the L16 did a good job when I took a relatively close shot of the cattails. This time was different, though, and I don’t know why.

You can’t really see it on this page, but if you “click” on the image and view it in another tab, it’s out of focus. The autofocus blew it. This shot was taken at f/15 and 1/5400 sec. That’s an unbelievably fast shutter, but may also be why the image is so poorly focused. I just happened to take this shot a second time; I believe that, knowing that I was shooting into the sun, I adjusted the EV to +1 to compensate for the scene brightness:

This shot is also out of focus, but not quite so bad (shutter = 1/2200″). The magenta fringing from the chromatic aberration is also fairly pronounced in this image.

 

So, I’m just not going to beat this dead horse any longer today. Even with the software update to the L16 camera, I still don’t see that the the L16 is ready for prime time. Again, I want it to improve and to become one of my go-to cameras, but it’s not there yet. I hope that the system is markedly improved by the time I take my backpacking trip in the summer of 2018.

 

Another person recently wrote an L16 review on Petapixel and he was honest and blunt.

 

Thanks for reading.