Spent the last couple of nights/days shooting our elementary school yearly play with my D700.
Although I have some faster primes I ended up using my 80-200AFS or a rented 70-200VRII because I needed the focal length variation during the play as there was not enough time to change lenses.
Anyways I set the aperture to f/4 and the shutter speed to 1/200s to cover movement at 200mm and minimal depth of field and let the ISO float due to the wide variation in the lighting. Most of the shots ended up at ISO 1600 to 3200 (the max I would let it go).
If I had shot with a D800 with all those extra pixels I would have had to increase the shutter speed to maybe 1/320s or so to counter movement (I had the camera on a monopod, so my movement wasn't really a factor) and then a higher ISO to keep the exposure the same.
So the question is, would the image quality, as is noise for the most part, been better with a D800, say at iso 6400 vs my D700 at ISO 3200?
Would the D800 in this situation really gotten me any better images?
12MP resolution is plenty, so would the downsampling of the 36MP images produce superior shots to the D700?
I'll be doing the same thing next year and would like to have better image quality if possible and noise is definitely the biggest issue with IQ.
Due to the lighting I have to do a lot of post work bringing up shadows, reducing highlights, etc. in NX2 so the files have to be pretty pliable (I shoot 14bit NEF).
Thanks for any comments - or perhaps we'll just have to wait and see how the high ISO of the D800 works out.
You do not need to increase the shutter speed at all with more pixels.
You will get the same final resolution as you would have with the old camera if you use the same technique. Is it possible it may not look perfectly crisp at 100%, sure.
But that is not the point. The point is how it looks as it is viewed, and more pixels will NOT reduce that quality due to motion blur.
So far, I don't think we've seen any evidence at all the the D800 was designed to be Nikon's best high ISO performer. As mentioned above, more pixels will not make motion blur more sharp. With the gear currently available, your choices are either buy a D3s or a Nikon 200mm f2. Or, maybe wait and see what else Nikon releases between now & then. You know something will come eventually if you are patient.
It would give you about the same result - but with a little more work. I doubt the software manufacturers will have optimized the raw converters until next year, or that they will "ever" do so.
From a purely technical PoV, the 800 seems to be about half a stop better than the D700 - increased efficiency, much lower electronic noise - but there's always the trouble with downscaling a Bayer interpolated image. Image noise doesn't scale perfectly until you go below 50-60% image scale. Between 99 and down to 60% image scale you mostly make the noise pattern tighter, contain energy at a higher pixel frequency but at the same strength. It gives a lot better and less distracting "grain" and also more detail, but it's not really "less noise".
The reason I mentioned raw-converters is that there are SEVERAL ways to offset this, by adapting the conversion parameters to the intended output size. This would give perfect scaling of noise, but we're not there yet.
theSuede wrote:
It would give you about the same result - but with a little more work. I doubt the software manufacturers will have optimized the raw converters until next year, or that they will "ever" do so.
From a purely technical PoV, the 800 seems to be about half a stop better than the D700 - increased efficiency, much lower electronic noise - but there's always the trouble with downscaling a Bayer interpolated image. Image noise doesn't scale perfectly until you go below 50-60% image scale. Between 99 and down to 60% image scale you mostly make the noise pattern tighter, contain energy at a higher pixel frequency but at the same strength. It gives a lot better and less distracting "grain" and also more detail, but it's not really "less noise".
The reason I mentioned raw-converters is that there are SEVERAL ways to offset this, by adapting the conversion parameters to the intended output size. This would give perfect scaling of noise, but we're not there yet.
It should also be possible to go stronger with NR methods due to the fact that the spacial frequency of noise will be higher than that of actual detail? No?
I don't mean to be disrespectful, but wouldn't this be a more appropriate question to ask when the D800 is out in full force and we can see how well it performs in a variety of conditions with users here posting their shots? It seems like everyone is asking a similar question "Will the D800..." but we have very few sample images and even fewer from people whose style and technique you "know" (i.e. FM member 123).
Maybe the D800's ISO is 2x worse than the D700 (no evidence, just as an example) so maybe down-sampled it's 12MP won't be as good. Or maybe it's sensor is just as clean or cleaner. I would have expected the D7000 to perform worse than the D300 based off pixel-pitch and the trend of more pixels == more noise, but I don't think that's been the case!
I chose now to ask because I just came off of some shooting that stretched the D700 to it's limits AND there are people out there measuring, calculating, and shooting the D800 at high ISO.
I think the information is now just getting out there so I think this kind of discussion and my specific question is worth talking about and it's NOT too soon.
I chose now to ask because I just came off of some shooting that stretched the D700 to it's limits AND there are people out there measuring, calculating, and shooting the D800 at high ISO.
John
Yep very true.....so let just wait for that information to come in and we can see what conslutions can be made from it..........Peter
I chose now to ask because I just came off of some shooting that stretched the D700 to it's limits...
John
Shooting at f/4 with shutter speeds at 1/200 and ISO's between 1600 & 3200 is not stretching the D700 to its limits. My D300 would still be yawning at those settings.
Tommy_D wrote:
Shooting at f/4 with shutter speeds at 1/200 and ISO's between 1600 & 3200 is not stretching the D700 to its limits. My D300 would still be yawning at those settings.
It was for this particular subject matter and my D300 would definitely be out of it's league.
This was theater and for the subjects that were well lit fairly well is was no problem - it's the parts of the image or the scenes that were very poorly lit, especially with colored lighting that really pose the challenge as I had to heavily use exposure comp. and shadow protection in NX2 to make the images useful.
I tested the D800 yesterday with a Nikon rep and I can tell you that the camera is amazing. I did some shots at Iso 6400 and the noise is better than my D3. The rep told me that for High Iso noise, the D800 is somewhere between the D3 and D3s and my tests seem to confirm that.
eos3d wrote:
I tested the D800 yesterday with a Nikon rep and I can tell you that the camera is amazing. I did some shots at Iso 6400 and the noise is better than my D3. The rep told me that for High Iso noise, the D800 is somewhere between the D3 and D3s and my tests seem to confirm that.
And the Nikon rep told me that the cam I tried was still some sort of prototype and that the D800 that will hit the market (next month) will be even better
