Just a quick comment, probably to multiple posters, so don\'t take it personally.
The notion that comparisons must somehow neutralize the cameras to some default state makes some logical sense but little photographic sense. No one simply leaves images as they come from the camera - we tweak, adjust, compensate, and so forth to pull our ideal best image out of what the camera captures.
I\'ve always felt that the best real world test would be one in which a photographer takes images from all of the test cameras and then uses a workflow optimized for each camera to produce the best possible prints for comparison. This reflects that way that photographers actually use cameras to make real photographs. To make it more interesting, you might want to have, say, ten skillful photographers try to produce the very best images that they know how to produce using the same approach and then compare.
To shoot all cameras in exactly the same way and the leave all files in the their default state tells us as much about the actual potential performance of the cameras as putting drivers in three cars and making sure that they always push down the accelerator peddle to exactly 50% of its range of travel tells us about automobile performance. ;-)
For an expressive form that has beautiful and compelling photographs as its ultimate goal and which measure success by the effectiveness of those photographs and the degree to which they move us and communicate a personal vision of the photographer, we sometimes seem to focus excessively and almost obsessively on tiny, insignificant differences that matter very, very little. They are not completely insignificant, just way less significant that our attention to them seems to suggest.
Dan
cgarcia wrote: 24Peter wrote: Gunzorro wrote:
cgarcia -- Thank you for the tests! Echoing what Dan said: the tests show we have three very usable cameras here with higher IQ than their predecessors. We can debate the virtues of the improvement or how the Canon/Nikon rivalry is going, but we can take these out without argument and get excellent results. That\'s what counts.
I\'m impressed Canon has built such a nice little FF camera -- nothing seems missing on the IQ compared to the more expensive models, at least on the surface.
Looking forward to more \"in life\" comparisons between these models.
I\'m no expert but shouldn\'t the image resolutions be \"normalized\" to make a valid comparison? Won\'t the noise in the 5DIII image look \"better\" at 18MP, whereas the noise in the 1DX images look \"worse\" at 22MP?
Yes, but postprocessing the images comes at a cost, maybe introducing an additional variable in the already difficult comparison. I think that the other approach (to measure the noise difference and compare it with the correspondence in resolution terms) is also valid: that is, if a given camera has one full stop advantage in noise over other camera but has half the pixels, both have the same ISO performance upon physics laws (well, we depend on noise reduction algorithms performance when trading image resolution for noise). The 1DX vs 5D3 resolution difference should end in about 1/3 f-stop (log2(22/18)) noise advantage for 1DX at pixel level (eg. 1DX at ISO 1000 should match 5D3 at ISO 800) ending in the same noise at \"image level\" after applying the proper cleaning+downsizing+sharpening software to 5D3.
Dec 06, 2012 at 03:02 AM
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