Thursday, April 8, 2010

D700 ISO ladder in terrible light

SO that lighting setup I used for the F80EXR vs F70EXR ISO ladders was just sitting there when I realized that I was quite curious as to the difference between the F80EXR and the D700.

This sounds silly, but people on forums like the FTF make such comparisons every day … in all seriousness.

Now, it’s pretty obvious that those who actually believe there is something approaching image quality parity between cameras like these are lacking in any basic photographic education. But they often tend to be rather vocal in their ignorance, so I thought it worth publishing an ISO ladder shot in the same light on the D700. In jpeg. No RAW advantage. Custom white balance. Basically the same parameters as were used for the F70EXR and F80EXR.

So here it is:

d700_bad_light_iso_ladder[1]

Click through to see the big version … it’s huge.

What you will see is that, in terms of chroma noise, the D700 image at 25600 ISO is about equivalent to the F80EXR image at 800 ISO. That’s about 5 stops. About right when you compare sensor sizes.

The laws of physics have spoken …

2 comments:

Adam-T said...

I routinely use the D700 up to ISO6400, beyond that as your ISO ladder shows it starts to degrade if heavy crops or massive prints are needed but still amazingly usable.

Kim Letkeman said...

Yes, surprisingly good, even way up there. But it does break down fast after 6400 ISO ...