This is a review with no comparison because there is literally nothing you can compare the Sigma Quattro cameras to. They are their own thing. Digital cameras that capture light the way no other brand of digital cameras does.
Photography enthusiast website PetaPixel released an article recently titled 9 of the Most Unique Digital Cameras Ever Made.
I have bought and fallen in love with three cameras on that list.
That's not bragging rights. I have a nose for going all in on short lived technology. I'm the guy that remembers how Betamax tapes were so much better than VHS.
I first got the Sigma DP0 Quattro because I was really in to photographing wide angle at the time, and nothing can depict an image with drama like an ultrawide lens. Sharp lenses at ultra wide are hard for SLR camera makers to make well. There's always a give and take once you get wider than 28mm. They go soft, they vignette, and they distort. Sigma solved this by having the lens dedicated to the camera body. No zooming, no changing lenses, just the best resolution in a 14mm lens you can get short of a field camera (21mm at 35mm equivalent if you're a gear head but don't overthink it. This is not about gear, this is about what it's like to use that gear to create.) It's sharp!
That's not what knocked my socks off though. The magic is in the color and the detail.
Ringling Museum, Sarasota Florida
Tac sharp corner to corner, with color and detail like I can not get except from 120 slide film. It's high end medium format digital photography for less than $1000. I was hooked.
The real magic is not (only) in the lens, it's not the quirky looks, it's inside the camera. The sensor, totally different from from any other camera company.
Remember when you were a kid and, if you sat too close to the TV, you could see those individual red, green, and blue balls that made up an image...sigh...I mean those of you who had a childhood before flat screen TVs were invented: do you remember how ugly and pixelated the picture was up close? That's how other digital cameras work. They have red green and blue pixels. Now newer cameras, even your cell phone camera, have LOTS of those pixels. A lot more than a 1980s TV did. That's why, back in the day, if you wanted stunning imagery in entertainment, you saw movies in a movie theater.
Anyway, modern cameras are amazing, but if I have to use digital, I prefer the Foveon sensor in the Quattro cameras. They're really three sensors laid on top of each other. The first layer the light hits, only takes a blue photograph, the second layer takes a green one, and the last layer takes a red photograph. That's the same way color film photography works.
Then a computer in the camera puts them all together with a program that runs so hot, it's in the camera inside the handle to the far right so the heat from it running doesn't screw up the sensor behind the lens. The design looks different but that's a good thing. Just like holding your hands at the nine and three o'clock position on a car gives you the steadiest, most stable, steering, holding your hands apart on a camera body like this can give you the steadiest, most stable, photograph. It increases what you can capture handheld without camera shake.
What thrilled me more, was this meant the camera takes black and white photographs that, before, I could only capture like this on film. There's just some way it depicts light. Even the falloff looks like it should.
Then I moved across country and began photographing with my DP0 Quattro in the Sonoran Desert.
The ultrawide medium format look, the shapes, the texture...I had not been this excited about photography in a lot of ways for decades.
Then, during monsoon season, I purchased the Quattro 3, a longer lens camera with the same sensor that let me get up close and blur out the background.
Another $1,000 camera producing quality I could not even replicate with a $1,000 lens before I bought a camera that produced these results.
And photographs flew straight from the camera rendering color exactly the way I wanted.
Before this, I could have spent hours in post processing and still not been happy.
Photographs are not for sharing on FaceBook and Instagram, though. They are for printing. I had my distributor print a test copy of my photograph Rainbow in the Catalina Foothills at A0 size (approximately 33" x 46") to make sure it passes muster to sell in my Gift Shop and it looks AMAZING.
So what's the catch? There's several. For one thing, it is slooooow. Set it at 100 ISO and that's your speed. You can get "usable" photographs up to, maybe 800 ISO but above 100, and you are better off switching to your cell phone. I've gotten some decent event photographs, portraits, and great shots of my pets with it but if you're on the move, you're better off using another camera.
Don't bother shooting jpeg. RAW is what gives the astounding quality. When you do shoot RAW, the software to convert it is also snail slow and a little clunky to work with. I'm used to waiting for negatives from the lab and scanning my own film though, so it's frictionless workflow as far as I'm concerned.
For the Quattro series, you're paying four figures to use one lens. It's an amazing lens but you need to get closer or farther away with your feet. No changing lenses, no zooming in and out.
In short, it's a niche camera. But if you want a camera that depicts what you see, I have not shot with better.
See you next week!