sven keil

<p><strong>You can find a statistics about shutterlife here</strong> :<br /> http://olegkikin.com/shutterlife/<br>

Would prefer the D200 also.</p>

<p>You can find a statistics about shutterlife here:<br>

http://olegkikin.com/shutterlife/</p>

<p>I suppose you already have several lenses. If I were you I would stick with my Canon gear, because, as others have mentioned previously, both brands have to evolve if they want to sell their bodies, and Canon is not sleeping for sure. However, you may want to consider to complement your gear with a D700 (or D300 or ...) if you think that you will need it. As for me, I use equipment according to purpose...for example for available light and perspective I pick up my D700, for telephotos+IR I still love my D70s, and for portraits and sunny outdoor with strong contrasts the S5 is excellent. With Nikons there are lenses which perform better on one body than the other (e.g. D70s+180mm/f2.8 is unbeatable in sharpness, but the same lens on the S5 gives inferior results, and vice versa with the 50mm/f14, according to my subjective experience), so this should also be taken in consideration if you decided to switch or merely complement. But I guess with Canon this may be similar.</p>

<p>Leaving out the on-the-wall-focussed image, I get similar results in terms of sharpness when I use a Hoya Polariser on my AD-180mm/f2.8 (its Nikon, but the "unsharpness" looks so similar to your results), and there is no way of getting it sharp. With the same focus setting, removing the Polariser from the lens removes also the sharpness problem. So the Polfilter now is tabu.<br /> You should put the camera on firm ground (tripod) and make some systematic test:<br /> 1) focus manually versus auto<br /> 2) wide open versus smaller apertures<br /> 3) flash versus no flash (daylight)<br /> 4) diffuser versus no diffuser<br /> This makes 16 combinations for shooting. For sure then you have identified the problem (if this test does not reveal anything, then the lens should be sent in for inspection).</p>

<p>Perhaps you will lynch me or calling me a liar, and I do not mean to contemn the new 50mm/14, but the results look pretty much like what I am used to get from my AF-50mm, pre-D-Made-In-Japan-14 which rattles a lot while focussing...perhaps I was lucky with my exemplar...</p>

<p>Dave is right - a camera must be viewed in its totality. Much work in fact comes post-sensory and is software (having a better noise reduction method than others, having a better tone mapping algorithm than others, having a better de-mosaicking method than others). So, they may have the same sensor, but results may be entirely different because of different image processing methods. PS: of course, also different hardware components after the sensor, e.g. with lower noise, are important, too (depending on the implementation of the aforementioned image processing methods).</p>

For portraits, I would prefer the S5 over the D200. You can get the S5 now for half of the price of a D90 in

Europe, and the S5 can meter with old manual Nikkors (the D90 cannot). The only drawback is burst rate, but on

the positive side we have dynamic range and a high (per-pixel) resolution 6MP camera. Bigger image sizes do not

reveal more detail (12MP do not make much sense - R and S pixel are under the same microlens). There are

reasonable fast and free raw converters like s7pro, and this delivers on par results with Fuji's one if you save

the result as 12MP, and then downsample to 6MP with Photoshop etc. Otherwise (6MP directly from s7raw) you loose

some per-pixel-resolution. Of course D300 is superior in noise, resolution, and burst rate, but not in dynamic

range and price. Fuji perhaps does not produce any other DSLR camera, but who cares? After a few years you will

anyway get a new one, and I think spare parts will still be available. Eventually Fuji keeps on manufacturing

smaller consumer cameras.

Same to me - I am not a pro. Confirming what has been said: 85/f14 does excellent, did not test the 50mm/f18

yet, but shot around extensively with the AF-50mm/f14 (non-D), and could not identify major issues. Check out

http://www.naturfotograf.com/lens_surv.html - Bjørn commented on,and tested, a lot of lenses (rating them from

poor=1 to 5=excellent) on different bodies (look for D3 ratings, lenses should perform similar on D700)

Post scriptum:

 

More Megapixels --> less ISO boosting, but higher serotonin boosting. This is neuromarketing :-)

"exclusive low-pass filter with multi-layer coating for pristine resolution and minimized moiré"

 

It is really amazing how even the strangest features are praised for marketing ;-)

 

It is nothing new that if you want resolution, you should apply a really small amount of low-pass filtering (since it filters out the highest frequencies, which convey fine detail). And if you want to get resolution, you have to live with aliasing effect (Moiré patters).

 

And if you are smart, you can implement some of the latest image processing techniques for suppressing aliasing effects. Then you get sharp images and good Moiré suppression.

 

Would be interesting to know which anti-Moiré strategy Nikon has implemented. Sadly, the brochure leaves me with more questions than answers.

 

For me 12MP are at the moment more than enough - I also rather have fine low-light performance. But of course this depends on the needs of each and everybody.

 

Why are megapixels always used as the prominent marketing strategy? Why not dynamic range or tonal range? Why not SNR? Seems that humans think in terms of quantities...so having more megapixels per Euro/Dollar/Yen activates the brain regions which are assoiated with reward. Megapixels make us feel better!

Dpreview says $7999, €7728, £5499

 

 

Samples here: http://www.nikon-image.com/jpn/products/camera/slr/digital/d3x/sample.htm

(note that the last one has been taken with a 50mm F/1.4 G lens)

 

Does anybody now if they finally incorporated the SONY sensor? The specs gives the impression that Nikon developed their own one.

 

heise.de (German) says that "The new D3x sensor (nominally 1600ISO, with boosting max 6400) cannot match the enormous low-light sensitivity of the D3 capturing device (max. 25,600 ISO; original text "Von der enormen Lichtempfindlichkeit des D3-Bildaufnehmers [max. 25.600 ISO] ist der neue D3X-Sensor mit nominal 1600 ISO [boostbar auf 6400 ISO] aber weit entfernt")

Which body do you use? I did not like the AiS-35mm/f14 results of my D70s so much, because of bluish CA issues (although images were razor sharp in the center). However, on D700, the 35m/f14 is a capable performer, and results are stunning. Not much blue CA, and very nice & clean colors.

I shot a lot with the combination D70s + AF-D 180mm/f2.8. Summarising my experience (some points were already made before):

1) Sport - it depends on the type of sports. But you should know it advance where the action is (pre-focus), otherwise you perhaps miss your shot. But not impossible if you know the baby well.

2) The optical quality is among the best of all Nikkors. The zooms, however, give you more flexibility (80-200), or responsiveness (70-200)

3) You will note the difference of having one of the zooms or the light-weighted 180mm hanging around your neck.

4) I like the 180mm very much, and I chose it over the zooms for weight and optical quality. For me it is perfect, and up to know I did not miss much a zoom lens (in fact, I only have primes except one plastic-zoomy-hello-kitty-lens)

It is likely that is has the Sony sensor, and teh Sony A900 is on par in dyamic range with the D3 (dxomark.com). Of course you need to apply more noise reduction to high ISO images of D3x than to D700/D3. But again, the Sony is ranked number five at dxomark.com.

 

dpreview.com says [about the Sony A900 with the 24mp sensor]"Measured noise as you move up the ISO range is broadly the same for all cameras [A900, D700, EOS 4D, EOS 1DS Mark III], though one glance at the crops above should be enough to tell you that Sony is making increasingly desperate attempts to control noise through pretty brutal noise reduction as you head up the scale. By ISO 3200 the result is a blurry mess with little fine detail - with the added insult of visible chroma noise in the shadow areas. I think it's fair to say that ISO 3200 and 6400 are firmly in the 'emergency use only' bracket (of course with 24MP to play with you shouldn't have many problems at small print sizes).

 

Funny, the guy from the local Nikon service told me a month ago that a 24MP Nikon was on its way ;-)

 

I wait for the day when the cameras do something similar as the retina in our eye: good light, high resolution. Poor lighting, photoreceptors connect to each other in order to average out noise, but at the cost of resolution (bith spatial and temporal). A camera working like that would be D3x at low ISO, and D3 at high ISO (in terms of noise and resolution).

According to dpreview, the D700 has 12 stops in RAW (14bits), and 5 less in JPEG. Less dynamic range means a steeper S-shaped curves (=sigmoidal exposure curve). It clips your highlights (value 255 for each channel), and/or makes your shadows black value 0). You get better, snappier contrasts, though.

 

When setting your D700 to "NEUTRAL" and reducing contrast you will get the maximum DR in your JPEGs, but probably they will look more boring.

 

With Nikon Capture NX2, the only chance to get the highlights back is to decrease exposure, and turn up D-lighting. But any further processing step in NX2 only operates only on a 8 bit range.

I use them regularly since my D70s, but my veteran performer is a 28mm/f3.5

(http://www.photo.net/photo/8194008). I also have a 28mm/f28 CRC

(http://www.photo.net/photo/8186615), and have the 35mm/f14 on my D700 already two months or so.

Another of my favorites is the 50mm/f1.8 (thanks Björn!), it's the hell of a lens (attachment).<div></div>

We (humans) perceive glow everytime when a luminance gradient (a smooth variation in luminance, compared to a steep edge) increases linerly to a plateau. Then our brain let us "see" something as glowing. So, a possible explanation of the observed glowing effect is that the Bokeh in Leica lenses features such linear increments in intensity (=luminance), yielding glow perception. Other Bokehs are nonlinear, that is more like created through Gaussian blur, and in this case our brain does not create a corresponding sensation. Explained in more detail in http://arxiv.org/abs/0709.3237

"...according to DPreview, the D200 has a range of 8.2 stops and the D3 comes in at 8.5 stops. "

"That is for 8 bit per channel jpegs and is about what one would expect for a JPEG."

 

Technical correction: You can *show* more than 8 stops in a JPEG, despite of having 8 bits. Fuji's S5 can show

some 12 stops (!) in a JPEG. Since sensors record information usually with more than 8 bits (12bits or 14bits),

raw files actually *encode* this dynamic range (which in turn depends on [often correlated] factors, e.g. pixel

size or noise). Now, in order to show the full 14 bits of a raw file on an ordinary monitor (shows some 8 bits

of tonal range), or to write it to a JPEG, you need a clever algorithm which maps the 14 bits to 8 bits ("tone

mapping algorithm"). "Clever" refers to constraints such as not clipping highlights, or not amplify noise in

darker zones. Furthermore, care is needed to avoid contrast inversion effects or other artefacts, such as halos.

Some comments on dynamic range - according to dpreview, the D3 encodes more dynamic range in the out-of-the-box JPEGs. JPEGs from the D700 are made to look more attractive ("punchy"), and are some 5 stops lower than what wold be possible from the RAWs. Wih RAW shooting, this difference (D3 vs. D700) does of course disappear. D-Lighting can occasionally produce halo-artefacts. The D200 can be expected to have less DR encoded in RAW because it uses 12bits (versus 14bits for D3/D700).

Thanks!

Hi,

 

I am interested in knowing how many digital cameras were sold by NIKON (or Canon, if somebody has the number) in

2007 (or 2008)...or does somebody know were to find such information? Similarly, is there any number about how

many plugins were sold for Photoshop in general in 2007/2008? I need the information for preparing a

document...thanks for helping. To have some numbers would be fine, also if they were only approximate.

Price-sharpness relation is better for the AF-50mm/1.8. There is an early AiS version of this lens which still beats the new AF-version in terms of sharpness (according to my experience). If it will be the 50mm/f14, I would wait for the new AFS version and listen what the others say. Although the latter performs excellent on DX (D300 etc), on FX (D3 & D700) you get some light fall off towards the corner. I have experiences with D70s/D700 and all the three mentioned lenses on all bodies. For more details you may take a look at Bjoern's website (http://www.naturfotograf.com/lens_norm.html). You find a resolution figure at http://www.photo.net/nikon-camera-forum/00Ew8i

 

M.

Sorry, to answer the original question: Yes, it does exactly that: raising luminance of darker regions,and reducing luminance in highlights. The art of the D-Lighting algorithm consists of (i) identify regions which are too dark or too bright, (ii) reduce the overal image contrast not too much, and (iii) avoid contrast-reversal artifacts. It is nothing but applying a tone-mapping method to a mid-dynamic range image (14 bits are not yet high dynamic range).

HI FOLKS,

 

Nikon D-Lighting is based on a patented method for dynamic range compression. Nikon licensed the patent from V.

Chesnokov (WO 02/089060, http://www.wikipatents.com/gb/2417381.html). The problem of dynamic range compression

is to map an output of say, 14 bits (input range), to a much smaller range of say, 8 bits (output range), thereby

doing better than simply clipping values which exceed 8 bits. So, if you do it by manipulating curves, you apply

the same operation to each pixel. But you can do better by choosing a different curve for each region. But

then, you have the problem to identify those regions (anisotropic diffusion may be used for that).

 

Nikon D-Lighting does an area-based dynamic range compression (citing from the patent):

 

A method of image processing comprising altering an input image using a non-linear image transform to generate an

output image, the process comprising correcting an image on an area-by-area basis to generate an output image

intensity (1',) of an area which is different to an input image intensity (1,) of the area, the output image

intensity (1',) of an area being related to the input image intensity (Ill) of the area by the ratio:

amplification coefficient= I'd/ 1, wherein the image processing method produces an output image in which the

amplification coefficient of a given area is varied in dependence upon the amplification coefficient of at least

one neighbouring area, in order that that, in at least part of the image, the local contrast of the input image

is at least partially preserved in the output image.

 

This is not simply a histogram modification, as this is a global operation. D-Lighting is more local, that is

region-based. However, there are now existing algorithms which give more pleasing results than D-Lighting.

 

AHHH - AAAnother thing: Two versions of D-Lighting exist. One that acts on the sensor's dynamic range (14 bit

for D300,D700,D3), this should be active D-lighting. Then, a post-sensor version, which acts on a smaller

dynamic range.

Next time use a C-notation such as /* SNARKY ON ....blablabla ... SNARKY OFF */

then even me is able to notice :-)