SD-9

SD-9

My name is John Duder, and I own a Sigma SD-9. I have successfully completed might 12 step recovery plan. Well that’s certainly how it feels with an SD-9: it’s got more quirks than a French family car, and I’ve never quite recovered from some of them.

The big attraction was that it used a Forveon sensor, which delivers rather nice results in a very quirky way – and within limits. The limits are largely to do with a limited ISO range that tops out at 400, by which point the quality is seriously compromised. But an all-plastic body, and separate batteries for the metering and autofocus systems and for the sensor don’t do it any favours at all. It’s superficially appealing to power the electronics with AA cells, but they need to be in very good shape. Zinc-carbon cells are useless, and NiCd batteries were of little use. Eventually, I bought a couple of sets of lithium disposables, at around £8 a set, and they seem to work.



It’s also a shameless camera in two senses. First, it’s cosmetically very similar to a Minolta Dynax 9 despite being vastly less solid lead built. And second, it’s a film camera with a sensor added and minimal other modifications. In the viewfinder, you can actually see the full frame view but with a greyed-out areas around the APS-C area of the sensor itself. Not so much a case of ‘show your workings’ as ‘show nothing but the workings’.

The Forveon sensor works differently from others because instead of having a grid of tiny light sensitive cells each picking up one of the primary colours, each pixel has got three cells stacked on top of each other, one for each colour red, blue and green. This is massively confusing because Sigma claim it’s a 9-megapixel device while the pixels along each side suggests it’s 3-megapixels. The confusion continues with current Sigma cameras, many of which have Forveon sensors.

On the plus side, colours are nicely rendered, and the standard zoom lens is well up to standard in terms of sharpness, though it lacks image stabilisation. So does the body. I imagine that it’s a bit of a collector’s item now, as there are none currently for sale on eBay.