That said, many renown photographers claim significant advantage of MFDBs over DSLRs.
I hate to have to write this because I don't really care, but:
- Few, if any, use the D3x,
- These claims are never backed up by any data or sample images for that matter.
What many backs users are seeing are backs that are calibrated for under-exposure, which gives them the impression that they have more highlight headroom for a given "correct exposure" (as defined by a traditional film based approach). More apparent highlight headroom is materialized by the mythical ability to recover blown highlights. I write "mythical" because it doesn't exist with the linear sensors we have today.
Highlight recovery can only be made possible by the existence of data in the first place, which is only possbile because the back histogram doesn't show the real information available in the files. Put it otherwise, a digital camera equiped with a linear sensor (read 100% of sensors on the market today) can only show highlight recovery ability if the system is calibrated for under exposure.
In other words, any DR claim based on apparent highlight recovery ability alone is misguided in the first place.Any DR comparison has to be made based on actual raw ETTR (regardless of exposure and of in camera histograms) and can only be made by looking at how noisy the shadows are.
Now this comparision can be done and might show some advantage to the backs, but we are getting awfully close to the DxO results and the only possible difference between their results and actual prints comparision is in the "look of the noise".
If this has been done and showed results differing
significantly from DxO results, how come we don't see these results? Again, don't show me 5DII results, I know about the noise banding at ISO 100 in deep shadows.
More often than not things that are hard to find end up not existing at all...
Cheers,
Bernard