By the way, sometimes I thought you were a D3X freak, but the work I have done recently on DR and also the stuff at "diglloyd" made me realize that the D3X is not just best of breed but leads with a considerable margin.
Erik,
It is fascinating to see how little reward Nikon got for their amazing work on DR. The last time we had a similar breakthrough was probably with the Canon 1Ds, yet Nikon probably got at most 10 times less praises.
This lack of reward is the thing that makes me say we are collectively showing our camera manufacturers that DR - although we keep saying it is the most important metric of our camera - does in fact not really matter because nobody is able to measure DR. The only possible result is that camera manufacturers will
focus less on DR after the D3x. Why should they spend big money on costly fundamental sensor research to improve DR? Nobody seems to notice to acknowledge their effort and those who do end up being considered as brand fan boys...
Nikon developed the D3x for digital photography pros supposed to understand ETTR, those same guys who were supposed to be able to expose slide films correctly. The D3x is not a forgiving camera in that it doesn't hide anything up its sleeves as far as highlight information goes. It the histogram in camera clips, you get clipped files.
Now, the irony of all this is that most photographers actually never liked the way slides worked. We liked the results, but didn't like the exposure risk.
What Nikon should have done was to make use of the great DR of the D3x to tweak the camera for systematic under-exposure. Make sure that to dial in a -1 stop under exposure, in other words artificially increase the ISO value. Now they couldn't do that as a major player, people would have jumped at them right away had they artificially over-sold the ISO values of their cameras.
Why do you think Phaseone decided to show ISO 45 as being ISO 100 on the P65+? Yet, I have not read a single report focusing on this characteristic of backs.
http://dxomark.com/index.php/en/Camera-Sen...se-One/P65-PlusLook no futher, 99% of the impression about the DR superiority of the backs come from this artificial under-exposure aimed at given the impression of highlight recovery.
Cheers,
Bernard