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Originally Posted by sean_reid
One of the things that I found fascinating is that the R-D1 is quite sensitive to IR as well and yet that never created a scandal that I can recall
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Two reasons, I think; no, three reasons. (Monty Python fans may now wish to chant, "
Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!")
1) Although the R-D 1 apparently has a fairly high sensitivity to some IR emissions, I suspect its
region of sensitivity within the IR spectrum is narrower than that of the M8. What that translates to in real-world photography is that there's a wider selection of scenes and conditions that will cause problems for the M8 than there is for the R-D 1; or, to put it in gamblers' terms, the probability that any given scene conditions will cause an IR problem on the R-D 1 is lower than for the M8.
2) When it does manifest itself, the R-D 1's IR response is less blatant. I've used an R-D 1 heavily for stage photography, which should be a prime breeding ground for IR contamination -- lots of IR from the hot stage lights, and lots of dark fabrics of all sorts. Now that the issue has been raised, I can think of a few cases in which I noticed dark areas that seemed redder than they should be -- but I always wrote it off either to metamerisms (the normal phenomenon of colors looking different under different lighting conditions) or to subtle color effects of the stage lights that I just hadn't noticed in the performance.
[Sean alludes to this in his Part 4 writeup: when looking through a big batch of shots, isolated color "misbehaviors" may be less apparent simply because you don't recall what color the original item was. The R-D1's relatively minor IR errors were easy to miss or write off because the resulting colors looked plausible and didn't attract attention. By contrast, the M8 seems prone to producing comparatively big, implausible effects; seeing a bride with purple hair next to a groom with a purple tux, you'd think, "If those were the real colors, I'd have remembered!"]
Another part of this point is that since the R-D1's IR shifts are relatively subtle, they're comparatively easy to correct. Now that I think of it, I remember a number of times when I'd shift the black point of an R-D1 shot slightly to "clean up the blacks," not realizing I was doing this to eliminate an IR-induced color cast.
3) I suspect there's a "social engineering" aspect to how cameras get scrutized for flaws. When the R-D 1 came out, everyone was flipping out about rangefinder-calibration issues among early-production units. I remember this era very clearly, and am sure there were quite a number of cameras with perfectly OK rangefinders that were condemned by their users as being "off," simply because everybody was scrutinizing RF calibration so closely that there was a tendency to blame it for every focusing problem (including user error!) With all the "early adopters" (and "early kibitzers") concentrating on that angle, people may have been too distracted to search for
image quality issues.
With the M8, on the other hand, nobody was worried about mechanical quality, and the focus of scrutiny was immediately on image quality. And let's not forget that the "magenta cast" was not the first, nor the most serious, image-quality issue that people were noticing (although it seems to have gotten the most attention of late.)
I think it was the "bleeding" issue (streaks emanating from heavily overexposed areas) and the rare but striking "ghost image" issue (sharply-rendered repetitions of highlights mirrored in a complementary region of the picture) that tipped off people to the fact that all was not well in M8-land in terms of image quality, and once they had been warned, they naturally started scrutinizing their images more carefully and noticed more problems as well.
[For the record: in the past I had noticed "bleeding" in R-D1 photos (and Nikon D100 photos as well, for that matter) but again, compared to the same effect on the M8, it seems more rare, harder to invoke, and less obtrusive when it does occur.]