I have an old Canon camcorder (a *massive* 40GB hard disk, well it was in 2006!) that produces MTS files at 720×480 or 640×480 and it turns out iMovie processes these correctly.
However, the new RX100 produces these same strange files. Here are the oddities:
- When you connect you RX100 to a Mac, it does appear as a hard drive (yeah!) and you can see the directory for JPGs and ARW (Sony’s version of RAW). Fortunately, the DxO 7.x that I use handles the ARW file just fine. I have to say that although Ming says that Sony Jpegs are mainly good enough, having used it for a while, it is nice to use the ARW file. It takes longer to process, so I think I’m going back to the shoot RAW and JPG (I used to do this) and for most uses (eg normal light), just use the JPG. If you need to process it (distortion for instance is automatically corrected in JPG but not RAW, but because the distortion correction is at a certain aspect ratio it actually crops the sensor image. I like to get the whole image even though it is not a true 3:2).
- Noise-wise, the reports say from DxO that its low S/N rating is ISO 390 which implies that ISO 400 is about what is best for high speed low light. However Luminous Landscape reports that up to ISO 800 works fine with little or no noise reduction required from RAW. Dpreview.com has a funky way it tests this through ACR but with NR off. This shows a noise curve identical to a Canon 5D Mark II and similar to the Olympus OM-D EM-5. Now this isn’t normalized by sensor size, but they think that about ISO 1600 is usable. I haven’t shot enough to know, but that is quite good particularly when you use the wide angle at F/1.8.
