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Reviews (1)
10 Nov, 2008
A Different View
10 of 10 found this helpful There are at least hundreds of new digital cameras of all types on the market right now, with every possible bell & whistle among them, not to mention megapixels galore. So why did I buy an older Sony F717 when I already have an Olympus E-410 dSLR? One word: infrared.
The F717 was a fairly high-end camera at its introduction, with a Carl Zeiss lens, multiple shooting modes, the ability to save images in either JPEG or TIFF format, and a unique body style that lets you work from pretty much any angle. And 5 megapixels was nothing to sneeze at. By today's standards, though, it's entry level, and many cameras have excellent optics and movable screens to allow shooting at odd angles. It's the infrared, or IR, that makes this camera still stand out.
In Nightshot mode, the camera flips an internal filter out of the way and the camera's sensor records light in the near-infrared range (approximately 750-900nm), which the human eye can't detect. It also uses a pair of small infrared sources around the outer edge of the lens to provide infrared illumination to focus and take pictures in total darkness. Handy for taking pictures when you're literally in the dark, but not what I was after.
Landscape images taken in infrared have an otherworldly quality. In black & white IR, the blue sky goes nearly black, and the green of the trees, shrubs, and grass becomes white. A tropical scene can become a wintry wonderland. You can spend a lot on an IR-capable SLR or to convert a normal one. If you just want to check out IR, the F717 is a great starting place at a very reasonable secondhand price.
Normal color pictures show that the Carl Zeiss lens is indeed good, and the adjustable angle of the lens comes in handy. Autofocus is fairly snappy, and the zoom can be managed with the typical rocker or using the ring on the outer end of the lens. In JPEG mode, images write to the proprietary Sony Memorystick quickly. However, TIFFs move painfully slowly: 30-40 seconds per image. Naturally, they also fill up the 'stick in a hurry, given their much larger uncompressed size.
Sony 'crippled' the NIghtshot mode somewhat after it hit the press that some people were using Sony's IR still & video cameras to shoot pictures through people's clothing. That's right, some fabrics are nearly transparent to IR; so are most sunglasses. Iin Nightshot mode, the aperture is locked at its largest size and the shutter works no faster than 1/60th of a second. In the dark, this won't be a problem. For daylight landscape images, this makes it nearly impossible to get an image that isn't heavily overexposed.
The solution: stack a good IR filter (try the Hoya R72) and a neutral density filter to block out most of the light. I use an ND8, but you can stack multiple filters of lower density. The lens takes 58mm filters; I strongly recommend 67mm filters and an adapter ring to avoid vignetting.
The image you see in the electronic viewfinder or on the LCD is coming straight from the sensor, so you're seeing the IR image that will be recorded. The images come out green, so you'll want to postprocess with Adobe Photoshop or another photo editor. Whether you convert the image to BW or to a toned image, the results can be both beautiful and eerie.
Downsides: This camera's JPEG artifacts are very heavy in IR images. If you print very large, this can be a problem. Writing TIFFs takes FOREVER but the landscape isn't running away. Just get a larger 'stick to hold those big files.