Michael, have I missed your 5D3 review?

[BernardLanguillier]

As a camera, the D800 leaves me absolutely clay cold - it's an utterly predictable and uninspired evolution of what's gone before - whereas the 5D Mk III is the first FF camera I've ever been actually interested in enough to want one.

My standards and expectations are as high in the genres I shoot as anyone else's in their genre of choice, and the D800 is a very poor second place to the 5D Mk III in the great scheme of things for me.

I fully understand that the D800 has one major drawback for Canon shooters, it doesn't get along well with the excellent Canon lenses. It would also be foolish to try to convince anyone to switch brands at this point in time.

This being said, and out of curiosity, what are the elements that get you excited about the 5D3 and bored about the D800?

Cheers,
Bernard

[Hans Kruse]

Great collective logic...

(1Ds3 = D3x) < 5DIII < D800E = D3x.

Assuming that owners of a given brand are honnest about the successive generatios of cameras, we can assume that the 2 statments are pretty accurate:
1Ds3 < 5DIII
D800E = D3x

What does that tell us about the relationship btwn 1Ds3 and D3x?

If D800E = D3X and D3X = 1Ds mkIII then D800 = 1Ds mkIII.

[BernardLanguillier]

D800 = 1Ds mkIII.

Is that your assessment?

Cheers,
Bernard

[Hans Kruse]

Is that your assessment?

Cheers,
Bernard

D3X = D800E is that you assessment?

[BernardLanguillier]

D3X = D800E is that you assessment?

Yes, in terms of usable DR it is.

As always, I find a perfect match between my experience shooting various subjects and the DxO Mark results.

Cheers,
Bernard

[Hans Kruse]

Yes, in terms of usable DR it is.

As always, I find a perfect match between my experience shooting various subjects and the DxO Mark results.

Was your transitive logic mentioned earlier only related to DR? I didn't see that qualification.

[BernardLanguillier]

Was your transitive logic mentioned earlier only related to DR? I didn't see that qualification.

My point was the apparent lack of logic, as you understood.

It was not meant to be only about DR, but we need to keep things simple and can't spend too much time on this, right?

One thing is clear, I was looking at landscape as the target application.

Let's start by agreeing about DR, then we can expand the debate to other topics? It is always better to agree on something reasonable first.  

Cheers,
Bernard

[Chris Pollock]

I fully understand that the D800 has one major drawback for Canon shooters, it doesn't get along well with the excellent Canon lenses.

Indeed. The ability to use my Canon lenses was the biggest selling point that the 5D3 had for me. Based on what I've read and seen I would certainly advise the D800 to anyone who didn't already own some lenses.

[prairiewing]

As a camera, the D800 leaves me absolutely clay cold - it's an utterly predictable and uninspired evolution of what's gone before - whereas the 5D Mk III is the first FF camera I've ever been actually interested in enough to want one.

My standards and expectations are as high in the genres I shoot as anyone else's in their genre of choice, and the D800 is a very poor second place to the 5D Mk III in the great scheme of things for me.

As a Canon shooter interested in both but who hasn't actually used either camera I'm curious--is this based on specifications and research or hands-on experience?  Sorry if this has already been answered but I've read so much about these cameras recently it's hard to keep straight who said what.

[nsnowlin]

"What does that tell us about the relationship btwn 1Ds3 and D3x?"

Bernard, I respect your opinions which I consider grounded in fact but I fear this statement was issued in haste.  I don't think there would be much difference when you print with exhaustive effort from files from either camera.  It is, after all, more important to me to describe the geometry of our factories, buildings that rise from stone or cement blocks, houses compressed within the hard flanks of sorrow and hope, the calm of a summer sunset, our nostalgia for propeller airplanes and steam locomotives, ships with hawsers loosened sailing into darkness lit lit like cities on holidays...what is immortal to photography.  All of our cameras will do.

Stu

[Bernard ODonovan]

Got it.     

Another review, assume you have seen but just in case you have not:

http://photo.net/equipment/canon/5D-MkIII/first-impressions-review/

 

[BernardLanguillier]

"What does that tell us about the relationship btwn 1Ds3 and D3x?"

Bernard, I respect your opinions which I consider grounded in fact but I fear this statement was issued in haste.  I don't think there would be much difference when you print with exhaustive effort from files from either camera.  It is, after all, more important to me to describe the geometry of our factories, buildings that rise from stone or cement blocks, houses compressed within the hard flanks of sorrow and hope, the calm of a summer sunset, our nostalgia for propeller airplanes and steam locomotives, ships with hawsers loosened sailing into darkness lit lit like cities on holidays...what is immortal to photography.  All of our cameras will do.

Stu

The 1Ds3 is an excellent camera that has been enabling talented photographers to achieve their vision. We all agree with this, we all agree it is themmost important aspect.

Now, is it relevant or meaningful to discuss camera performance? As far as I am concerned, this topic ranks very low in my list of points of interest.

But if we do spend a few minutes discussing this, in the obvious context described above, I'd rather do it with facts, coherence and logic being part of one's discussion toolkit. That's the engineer speaking here more than the photographer. When you do this, you reach the conclusion writen above.

Having worked for many years with the excellent, but technically inferioir SLRn/D2x, I totally understand the position some of you are in. The D2x was far behind the 1Ds/1DsII in terms of high ISOs and a bit behind at low ISO, but still allowed me to achieve most of the results I was trying to achieve at lower ISOs. I took part back then to some heated discussions with some Canon shooters who were unable to understand the difference btwn good enough and better.

I could feel a huge disconnect btwn my positive experience as a phoographer using the D2x vs the doomsday discussions about how far behind it was lagging. If you bother checking DxOmark data, you will see that the gap Between the 1Ds2 and D2x is in fact smaller than the gap btwn the D3x and the 1Ds3. The D800 takes this a bit further, but the breakhrough in terms of image quality was clearly the D3x.

So again, I have been there, I am not questioning the abilities of the 1Ds3 as an excellent phtographic tool. I am only focusing a tiny amount of time on the technical aspects of these cameras and proposing that we accept to acknowledge these facts.

Agreeing with the excellence if the D800 senor but disagreeing that the D3x was already similarly ahead 3 years ago is simply not coherent.

Cheers,
Bernard

[dreed]

...
Oh - and as an aside, I'm really sick of this recent "all that matters is low ISO DR, without which any sensor is 'mediocre'" nonsense. Has everyone suddenly become a "difficult light" landscape shooter?
...

That argument has a ring to it like the various high ISO arguments in the past. However please note that this is a website dedicated to landscape photography and that some of the best photography does come with difficult light so if there was to be a locus of discussion about the need for low ISO DR then this website would be it.

What is of more concern to myself is that Nikon (Sony) have managed to evolve the sensor in a way that has delivered a very noticeable and appreciable performance improvement whereas Canon has not. The sensor in the 5D3 is a little bit better than that in the 5D2 but still suffers from problems that have plagued 5D2 shooters - namely banding and noise.

[Hans Kruse]

That argument has a ring to it like the various high ISO arguments in the past. However please note that this is a website dedicated to landscape photography and that some of the best photography does come with difficult light so if there was to be a locus of discussion about the need for low ISO DR then this website would be it.

What is of more concern to myself is that Nikon (Sony) have managed to evolve the sensor in a way that has delivered a very noticeable and appreciable performance improvement whereas Canon has not. The sensor in the 5D3 is a little bit better than that in the 5D2 but still suffers from problems that have plagued 5D2 shooters - namely banding and noise.

Have you seen the noise and banding on the 5D mkII yourself? As you probably know I have the 1Ds mkIII and have now been shooting landscapes and many other things with this camera for over 4 years. My judgement of the IQ that comes out of this camera is that if you underexpose (for whatever reason) the IQ will suffer. I never had banding but noise certainly comes up lifting exposure several stops. I also got some RAW files from friends who shoot 5D mkII because of all the banding talk I was curious to see how bad this was and I couldn't get banding on any of these RAW files!! Yes, I have seen examples on forums, but when I got RAW files from them, they always had turned color noise reduction down to zero (from the default in Lightroom or ACR) and pushed exposure by 4 stops or more. And yes, I could in some cases see banding although it was never as bad when I developed the RAW files in Lightroom. I always use the default color noise reduction in Lightroom and never saw any reduction in details doing so.

So what does this mean? Is there banding or not on the 5D mkII sensor? I would say that in the real pictures I saw from the camera I couldn't see any issue with even extreme shadow lifting. Does it have it's limits just like the 1Ds mkIII? For sure. As an example when you in landscape shots have the sun in the picture and you need to preserve the highlights in clouds directly lit by the sun you need to either do exposure blending or pick a RAW file that is exposed for the highlights without clipping (or light clipping that LR4 can recover). This means a severely underexposed landscape where you may need to lift shadows/midtones by many stops. In that case there will be some situations where the RAW file from the Canon will not be good enough and the file from the D3X or D800 may be good enough.

So how important is this? As a serious landscape shooter I have had such situations and I always bracket with at least 5 pictures with typically 1 stop between them. This allows me to pick the optimal RAW file if this will work in one shot. If not then I can exposure blend as I will always take these shots on a tripod. So for landscape photographers I will argue that having a larger DR than the Canon sensors can give you is a nice to have but far from a requirement for serious landscape photography. I have not had the chance to test either the D3X or the D800 at this point and compared such situations to judge for myself how important I would rate this.

In the last 3 years since the D3X came with a better sensor especially with DR at low ISO, the software we have to handle large DR scenes have been really improved. There are now a number of applications for HDR exposure blending. Photomatix have added exposure blending to their HDR/tone mapping which gives further options for those who do not like the older tone mapping look. Also Photoshop have 32bit HDR files and as of Lightroom 4 RC2 these files are now supported in Lightroom. In addition Lightroom 4 and ACR 7 added features to do proper shadow lifting (also in the brush and grad filters) where fill light was never really very good. Does this mean that the Exmor sensor is kind of redundant for a Canon shooter? It really depends on what you shoot and how often you get into the border area where the Exmor sensor can salvage your shot where the Canon could not. It's hard for me to judge where exactly that would be. For my own landscape photography I have really not seen the sensor in the 1Ds mkIII as a real limitation. But would certainly welcome any improvements as always and at the moment there is no doubt that in terms of DR and shadow noise at low ISO the Canon sensors are trailing the Sony Exmor sensors. What I'm missing in all these discussions are real examples of where the difference that matters is. In principle as I do landscape photography as a business I could buy whatever equipment I want. I did look at the D3X when it came out and have reviewed all available comparable RAW files from Imaging Resource and Dpreview and I could see a little better shadow noise performance at extreme shadow lifting. The overall IQ was very similar so changing brands from the 1Ds mkIII to a D3X made very little sense. I did also look at the Pentax 645D and found that the pixel level quality was very similar to the 1Ds mkIII which would allow me to print bigger (I tried one on one of my workshops). I never print bigger than my Epson 3880 can print so this made little sense also and the 1Ds mkIII is a much better general purpose camera than the Pentax, so why add the Pentax? If I made very big prints I might have done it, but then the doubling in resolution is on the edge of what would make sense (and really make a difference). I think you would need 4x the pixels to really make a difference. I have no doubt that the 3x increase in pixels for the D700/D3 shooters to the D800 will really be seen in large prints. I have had many Nikon shooters on my workshops using D700 and D3 and none of them have mentioned that they were missing pixels! I even suggested to one of them to get a D3X and he was quite lukewarm to this camera  (even having a large format HP printer), but he has now bought the D800E.

[Hans Kruse]

The 1Ds3 is an excellent camera that has been enabling talented photographers to achieve their vision. We all agree with this, we all agree it is themmost important aspect.

Now, is it relevant or meaningful to discuss camera performance? As far as I am concerned, this topic ranks very low in my list of points of interest.

But if we do spend a few minutes discussing this, in the obvious context described above, I'd rather do it with facts, coherence and logic being part of one's discussion toolkit. That's the engineer speaking here more than the photographer. When you do this, you reach the conclusion writen above.

Having worked for many years with the excellent, but technically inferioir SLRn/D2x, I totally understand the position some of you are in. The D2x was far behind the 1Ds/1DsII in terms of high ISOs and a bit behind at low ISO, but still allowed me to achieve most of the results I was trying to achieve at lower ISOs. I took part back then to some heated discussions with some Canon shooters who were unable to understand the difference btwn good enough and better.

I could feel a huge disconnect btwn my positive experience as a phoographer using the D2x vs the doomsday discussions about how far behind it was lagging. If you bother checking DxOmark data, you will see that the gap Between the 1Ds2 and D2x is in fact smaller than the gap btwn the D3x and the 1Ds3. The D800 takes this a bit further, but the breakhrough in terms of image quality was clearly the D3x.

So again, I have been there, I am not questioning the abilities of the 1Ds3 as an excellent phtographic tool. I am only focusing a tiny amount of time on the technical aspects of these cameras and proposing that we accept to acknowledge these facts.

Agreeing with the excellence if the D800 senor but disagreeing that the D3x was already similarly ahead 3 years ago is simply not coherent.

Well, now you are not talking like an engineer Your comparison of the D2X to the 1Ds mkII was not only to a sensor with a marginally larger resolution but also from a crop camera to a full frame sensor. But maybe you argued that the sensor area didn't matter at the time? When comparing 1Ds mkIII with the D3X we are comparing two full frame cameras with almost identical resolution but wiht the low ISO DR advantage to the D3X. See my other post on this.

[MrSmith]

"As a camera, the D800 leaves me absolutely clay cold"

that's how it should be with all photographic equipment, that is unless you are a measurebator or your ego is boosted by affirmation of your vanity purchases by your peer group via electronic media .
images should stir the soul and imagination not cameras.
 

[BernardLanguillier]

Well, now you are not talking like an engineer Your comparison of the D2X to the 1Ds mkII was not only to a sensor with a marginally larger resolution but also from a crop camera to a full frame sensor. But maybe you argued that the sensor area didn't matter at the time? When comparing 1Ds mkIII with the D3X we are comparing two full frame cameras with almost identical resolution but wiht the low ISO DR advantage to the D3X. See my other post on this.

True, the 1DsII had also higher resolution.

As far as sensor area goes, I still think the smallest sensor offering the resolution/DR needed for a given application is the best one for landscape since the system relying on it will provide more DoF everything else being equal.

You can of course by-pass this basic situation with DoF stacking or T/S lenses in some cases.

Cheers,
Bernard

[Bart_van_der_Wolf]

As far as sensor area goes, I still think the smallest sensor offering the resolution/DR needed for a given application is the best one for landscape since the system relying on it will provide more DoF everything else being equal.

Hi Bernard,

But everything else is not equal. The reason that the physically smaller sensor array provides more DOF, is because of the shorter focal length used, not due to the size of the sensor array. Given the smaller magnification factor of the projected image, it indeed helps to have a denser sampling of that projected image, i.e. a smaller sensel pitch, and/or a lot of pixels which reduces the required output magnification.

Cheers,
Bart

[BernardLanguillier]

Hi Bernard,

But everything else is not equal. The reason that the physically smaller sensor array provides more DOF, is because of the shorter focal length used, not due to the size of the sensor array. Given the smaller magnification factor of the projected image, it indeed helps to have a denser sampling of that projected image, i.e. a smaller sensel pitch, and/or a lot of pixels which reduces the required output magnification.

I meant at equal framing, which does indeed imply a shorter focal lenght.

Cheers,
Bernard

[dreed]

Have you seen the noise and banding on the 5D mkII yourself?

Yes, I have.

Yes, I have seen examples on forums, but when I got RAW files from them, they always had turned color noise reduction down to zero (from the default in Lightroom or ACR) and pushed exposure by 4 stops or more. And yes, I could in some cases see banding although it was never as bad when I developed the RAW files in Lightroom.

You don't need to push the exposure by 4 stops to see it. I'll see if I can create or have a sample image that I can send to you to demonstrate. ... sometime later ... in the images that quickly come to the fore, I've had to apply an exposure increment of +3 in LR. In actual fact, I'd consider them to be underexposed. But I'm sure I've seen this problem without having to do that.

So how important is this? As a serious landscape shooter I have had such situations and I always bracket with at least 5 pictures with typically 1 stop between them. This allows me to pick the optimal RAW file if this will work in one shot. If not then I can exposure blend as I will always take these shots on a tripod.

Where possible, I use a similar technique.

So for landscape photographers I will argue that having a larger DR than the Canon sensors can give you is a nice to have but far from a requirement for serious landscape photography. I have not had the chance to test either the D3X or the D800 at this point and compared such situations to judge for myself how important I would rate this.

Whilst I don't disagree with that, what I find to be almost offensive on Canon's part is to dish up almost exactly the same sensor 3 years later as if they didn't consider it needed any improvement. If the D800 didn't exist, or performed largely the same as the D700, then I'd be less upset with what Canon is offering and I think this is likely to resonate with many others out there.