This is a quicky test, shot at lunch today when I noticed that we have a new pet. A female Mallard Duck, if I am not mistaken. She showed up yesterday, left for the night, and came back today. I suppose that makes Nick the Duck Whisperer.
I grabbed the two cams quickly to test reach and acuity. The F770 looks great, this being a RAF file processed in ACR7 and CS6. All the images in this article are RAFs processed in ACR7 and CS6 beta.
F770EXR 100iso f/5.3 1/180 500mm -.33ev
That’s a very crisp shot.
Here is the F550 rendering …
F550EXR 100iso f/5.3 1/160 360mm
A nice shot, and just as crisp. But slightly less magnification as expected.
Next up we have a shot of the Annabelle Hydrangea with last year’s crunchy flowers hanging in there.
F770EXR 100iso f/5.3 1/500 500mm -.67ev
f550exr 100iso f/5.3 1/300 360mm
Note that there is no exposure compensation for the F550EXR. I am definitely noticing two things so far:
- The sunlight compensation for the F770 makes the LCD much too bright a lot of the time, so you end up dialing in compensation when not needed.
- The meter is very different … or at least it seems so. But I’ll test that more formally later.
The bokeh for the F770 is even better than that of the F550. The 500mm no doubt makes that difference, since depth of field is that much shallower.
And finally …
F770exr 100iso f/11 1/320 500mm -.67ev
f550exr 100iso f/5.3 1/800 360mm
Note the aperture and shutter speed difference … in my opinion, the F770 made a mistake here when it set f/11. That slowed the shutter to just over half f/FL, which is risky. Interesting difference here … needs more testing.
Conclusion
What conclusion? These are all very similar. I cropped that last one to make them match really closely. They all match pretty well. I think the F770 is a bit better, but that’s a function of reach.
Anyway, here are crops from the ducks …
I find the F770 keeping more detail, but then I also applied a bit less NR, which shows up in more grain.
Anyway … no clear victor in this segment. I would personally give the nod to the F770 just for the extra magnification. Gotta love subject isolation …
