This is just another post to confirm how human beings are susceptible to ongoing delusions.
6-7 years ago, Sony looked like the new "logical choice" for DSLR astrophotography. They released incredibly sensitive cameras with the A7 series. At Van Vleck, Charles had an A7S that basically acted like a noisy night-vision camera. Compared to Canon and Nikon, these new A7S's and A7R's felt like they were two generations ahead of everyone. 12800 ISO on the Sony often looked better than 6400 ISO images in online test images from Canon cameras.
I remember on Cloudynights, there was a lot interest and excitement about these cameras. Some people were doing mods to replace the built in filters with astro-friendly filters and companies like LifePixel were offering services to make the cameras more astro-friendly.
But around 2016, people who were doing astrophtography with the the A7 series noticed an interesting problem. The files produced seemed to have less noise and stars than expected. The frames of the night sky were unusually "clean". This is one of those blatant examples of how one person's benefit is another person's problem. It seemed to have happened after a firmware update.
People started recognizing this "problem" and Petapixel published an article about it.
https://petapixel.com/2017/05/04/star-eater-issue-no-longer-recommend-sony-cameras-astrophotography/
When you went on general camera forums, there were the expected acerbic and "toxic" exchanges between those who cared and those who didn't. Obviously, if you only shot the camera during the day, then you would never see this issue. And most people who own cameras only rarely dabble in nighttime photography. It felt like a situation where the minority of users who used the A7's for astrophotography didn't matter. Sony was silent on the issue and though it would have been really easy to add a setting in the camera to turn off "star eating", they consistently chose not to. In fact, there are apparently some documented email exchanges with Sony engineers who bascially said they didn't see any problem.
It's "interesting" how when a major corporation decides there's no problem, then there's no problem.
Sony basically said STFU to maybe 10- 50,000 potential buyers. I'm pulling those numbers out of my ass but I think there were plenty of DSLR astrophotographers who were willing to jump ship to Sony around 2015-2016.
At some point, there was even an online petition in the hopes of getting Sony to recognize the problem.
https://www.change.org/p/sony-remove-star-eater-en
Nope, no change.
Part of the reason for the disappointment of Sony's response is the fact that both Nikon and Canon have raw files that don't "cook the raw image" in the way that Sony's cameras do. And I think that goes to a second concern that Sony's images are less representative of what the sensor is detecting. All cameras do some processing to the raw file before it gets to your camera memory card or the computer. But Sony seems to be saying they want the user to have less control over the image. Purely from a marketing perspective, this is not a bad thing. But it does paint a picture of a dumber consumer/photographer.
We all understand that governments (or govenmental systems) create a certain type of ideal citizen and population. But we don't want to acknowledge that corporations can exert a similar effect on populations as well.
In the meanwhile, both Canon and Nikon (to my suprise) released cameras that were astro-friendly. This was a kind of nod to the enthusiast and DSLR-astrophotography community. If you think about the financial loss from Canon and Nikon on these extremely specialized cameras, then that "nod" was really substantial.
Again, Sony has not responded with even a firmware update to give you the option to have more control over their aggressive noise reduction routines.
And what made things conspicuously stranger is another article by Alan Dyer that declared that Sony cameras no longer ate stars.
https://petapixel.com/2018/06/08/sonys-star-eater-problem-has-been-defeated-in-the-a7-iii/
Alan Dyer is a name within the astrophotography community. But if you look closely at his publications, you will see mainly milky-way vistas, star-trail images, aurora images, etc. They are all beautiful and wonderful pictures but there are very few telescopic targets. Of the telescopic targets that he shoots, we are only seeing the brightest and most dramatically rendered. Again, nothing wrong with that per se. It's just that the perspective of someone who doesn't shoot targets known primarily by NGC or IC designations isn't the most suited for judging subtle problems like the disappearance of small stars in an image. (I get this is debatable since there are some awful imagers out there who like their out of focus, overprocessed blobs that they call galaxies or nebulae.)
What's even more strange is that the comparison images in Dyer's article clearly show that the Sony is rendering less stars than the Nikon or Canon cameras. Here's is a quote:
"As the images below show, there is a very slight one-pixel-level softening that kicks in at 4 seconds and longer but it did not eat or wipe out stars..."
Two out of his three images in this same article show otherwise. Yes, it's better than it was in the A7R series but to conclude and declare that the A7III is no longer eating stars is just plain wrong.
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