Attention - these charts were run with the wrong gamma setting in Imatest
Please see this post for corrections:
To end the speculation, let's look at an actual conversion I made from 2 files, one from the D800, and one from the D800E.
Michael made sure that the test chart was perfectly focused, selecting the best from a focus series for each camera. The same 85mm f/1.4 lens was used at f/4 on both cameras.
Cheers,
Bart
Thanks Bart!
That's about the most useful data I've seen to date on any forum. I've taken the liberty of doing a quick and dirty run of the slant edge patterns on your downloaded png charts through Imatest Studio (version 3.9 Beta). These were completely unmolested (no sharpening etc.). I suspect Erik may be doing the same about now? I didn't have the true chart contrast to enter in the settings or know the quality of the edge transistions on the (printed?) chart (but they looked pretty clean). I did enter gamma at 2.20. There is a screen capture of the Imatest settings page at the end. If anyone has suggested changes to the settings, it's easy enough to renun the charts.
The horizontal and vertical edge profile are nearly identical between the D800 and the D800E. However as expected, the D800 shows lower contrast at higher spatial freqencies near Nyquist. I couldn't run a noise analysis because Imatest complained that the area was too small (this is probably not the best chart for evaluating noise anyway). The chromatic aberration tests are also interesting.
Since I'm not using Imatest for profit, I'll leave the necessary props for Normen Koren and company:
http://www.imatest.com/My only remaining concern is how much noise may be apparent in images from the D800 after various sharpening routines are applied to boost the low-contrast, high spatial frequency portion of the MTF plot to match the D800E?
D800 MTF horizontal slant edge
D800 MTF vertical slant edge
D800E MTF horizontal
D800E MTF vertical
D800 chromatic aberration horizontal
D800 chromatic aberration vertical
D800E chromatic aberration horizontal
D800E chromatic aberration vertical
Imatest settings for all tests
Hope others find this useful---or at least entertaining!
Kind regards,
Bob
Edit: Correction---this was done in Imatest version 3.9 Beta, not 3.8 Beta. Imatest have not yet updated the version reported on the charts (at least not in Imatest Studio).