Grade: B+, Slope:134, Ydg: 7000, Cost: $50/18wc
Set your YT video playback IQ to HD/1080p. (who uses a laptop these days?)
Summary: this is a decent course that is very different from Sunbrook GC, virtually flat, at least 1/2rd of the course is open & largely free of houses (or at least far-removed/above the course) the other half is much tighter and has houses on at least one side of the fairway if not both sides, but is more challenging and entertaining. Again the red "championship" tees at the back, but still one of the most well-liked public golf courses in St. George. A very-good round, with decent visuals and nice overall play.
The front side has sand where Western courses would have rocks & weeds & Eastern courses would have woods & water, so it's somewhat friendly. Both sides play back along the lake. The backside is much more rugged but still mostly dry.
****** WARNING: don't read the following unless you want a deep IQ-dive ********
I shot this with the same Google 6a, same processing that I used to create the Sunbrook GC video before the Golf101 video preceding this one in my stream. That video was a 1080p video produced on my 3? year old HP A8 laptop in Ubuntu 21 64-bit using Kdenlive, 15" monitor using native Ubuntu 21 video drivers. It looked fine, almost as much detail as in the original 25MP jpegs. But the video presented by YT had a noticeable IQ degradation to the point where it looked like a chalk drawing. It's not even close to the IQ of the video that I uploaded, so not even close to the original scene IQ. I wanted to see if I had the same problem here on this video especially since it isn't quite so detail-intensive.
I purposefully took some photos looking into the setting sun just to showcase/test the in-camera HDR. Afternoon golf means that decent in-camera HDR becomes more significant than the actual camera DR, noise & fine detail. If you can't see something in the image because it's blacked-out, then was it ever really there in the first place? The 6a is part of the new wave of photogenic real-time in-camera HDR. It will produce "raw" files (Adobe DNG format) but the amount of image-correction required to make good use of them is well beyond my desire to deal with. Short of someone providing the required lens-corrections, tone-curves and what-not to use them in Raw Therapee, because I'm not paying for Lightroom or Photoshop just to shoot this camera "raw".
But there is a noticeable loss of fine-detail in the 6a jpegs due to in-camera NR and a slight over-sharpening at least using the Google software on landscape shots. As a camera it is somewhat lacking compared to a 12MP D800 FF with a decent lens & ND filter with the same 38-50mm effective range, because the magnification that I would use at the very least is the 1x in the Google Photo app, which is now on a wheel-dial in the app, which can be scaled between the 0.6x min and the 2x max. But above 1.4x there's noticeable pixellation and loss of image fine-detail on landscape shots. It's not bad at 2x and/or on a full frame but clearly not as well-detailed as it would be at 1x, so again trading resolution for fine-detail.
It is not a bad pocket camera at all, seriously. But I had to start to take pics at 1x and 2x and ultimately I'll have to compare the 6a pics to the D750 at least (the D800 is really a portrait camera & I have temporarily broken my D850 :) but so far I have not seen so much NR as to smooth-out fairway grass like with my 12MP G1X (not to mention the 20MP RX100M3), even viewing Raw Therapee PNG files with NR off in the software, on the same 15" 1080 display, with the "raw" shots that I took at Whistling Straits. Luckily the shots didn't come-out *too* bad but I feel they are at best "just ok" and the real problem was lack of HDR, early-afternoon fog & at least some noise & NR even in ISO100 raw. I still want to look into that with dcraw, but I don't take IQ issues lightly, it really sucks to spend a lot of time & money to play a good course, take good photographs and the photos turn out less than decent....and I will probably never go out without the Pixel 6a in my pocket.
But I have to manually set the YT video playback to HD./1080p.
even with the otherwise nice & bright Canon G1X that seemed to be a good mix between portability and IQ otherwise...and there's a whole lot of fairway grass at Whistling Straits...that is bright-green in the summer sun of Wisconsin. I thought it would be fine in all that light shooting IS0-100 raw...and travelling way up there to play that course? It was not easy or cheap.
I rendered the Sun River video with the Quality setting on render in Kdenlive (SunRiver set to Q85.
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Sunbrook I'm unsure if it was enabled or default
They both look ok at 1080p. That video was 285MB uploaded, this one is 225MB uploaded, both 1080p originals with M.264 compression.
I know the 6a images have IQ issues even at 25MP, ISO 100 & 1x.
