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Author Topic: which camera is best for low light & large prints?  (Read 7971 times)

ondebanks

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which camera is best for low light & large prints?
« Reply #20 on: July 22, 2010, 08:10:07 am »

Quote from: eronald
The D3x or 5DII will fare best in this situation. D3x has better focus, 5DII is ok too at f5.6. D700 and D3 will run out of pixels.

Edmund

No-one cares more about "low light" performance than astrophotographers. And leaving the cooled-astro-CCD gang to one side for a moment, very few top-end DSLR astrophotographers shoot with a Nikon - it's overwhelmingly Canon. See http://www.astropix.com/HTML/I_ASTROP/NIK_CAN.HTM

One reason is because Nikon commits the cardinal sin: they f*ck with the RAW files!!, in long exposures. A Nikon "RAW" file shot at long exposure is not RAW at all: it has been median filtered before it leaves the camera. Pixels are no longer independent of each other, noise is correlated across neighbouring pixels, and resolution is reduced. This gives the illusion of better high ISO, long exposure performance, which the D3 series is noted for. But it's all a trick, and an undocumented trick at that. Is was only uncovered by people like Christian Buil, some years ago (http://astrosurf.com/buil/d70v10d/eval and on the D3, http://www.astrosurf.com/buil/nikon_test/test.htm). Despite the attention drawn to this practice by the astrophotography community and appeals to end it, Nikon persists to release new DSLRs with manipulated "RAWs". That's not all: they also truncate the lower level signal, and the NEF files are not truly lossless.

For as long as they mess with the files like this, I would never buy a Nikon; and given the choice right now between a Canon 5DII and a NikonD3/D3x for low light, I would not hesitate to pick the Canon.
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