5D vs D700 - Image Sharpness
Xitek have been lucky enough to test out a D700 and compare it to a 5D, with interesting results.
The images they posted have come under fire from some quarters as they appear to show the D700 producing somewhat soft images - so we decided to do our own test. As no RAW converters support the D700 yet, I modified the D700 RAW file to identify it as a D3 RAW. In that way, I could open both with ACR default settings. Crops below…
We see a slight advantage in per-pixel sharpness, and a very slight resolution advantage, to the 5D here - but certainly nothing that can’t be dealt with by adding some sharpening and it won’t be seen in any prints. It remains to be seen how lens choice may affect this - probably more so than any inherent sensor difference in real world use.
I’d put this down to the more aggressive anti-aliasing filter in the D700; you get slightly sharper images at the pixel level on the 5D, but less chance of moire with the D700.
It’s certainly a lot less worrying than a lot of threads on the internet have said it is
Full-sized JPGS: 5D D700
July 19th, 2008 at 9:00 pm
Interesting; there definitely appears to be more in camera sharpening going on in the Canon at least with the JPEG’s shown.
Running Smart Sharpen on the Nikon images quickly brings them up to a similar level of sharpness, whereas running the same sharpening on the Canon images quickly shows up some sharpening artifacts without further improvement over the Nikon images.
July 20th, 2008 at 12:25 pm
@Jeffrey - these images are not out-of-camera JPEGs, they are Adobe Camera Raw conversions from the RAW .CR2 and .NEF files - hence all sharpening is from ACR and has nothing to do with in-camera sharpening.
I did it this way to rule out the camera settings being a source of confusion; in this way we get the best possible comparison between the native capabilities of each model.
July 20th, 2008 at 1:12 pm
Thanks; what I looked at was the ability to tolerate sharpening of the images, both with the RAWS and JPEGS on the xitek site. I guess my interest was to see whether the Canon images with equivalent sharpening could be made to look even sharper yet than the Nikon, and this did not seem to be the case at least with my crude assessment.
July 20th, 2008 at 1:46 pm
This is what prompted me to look at this:
‘5D has a much weaker AA filter. The RAW files straight out of the camera are noticeably crisper from 5D. I used the 50mm lenses, f/10, tripod mounted, mirror lock-up, remote release. 5D shots were slightly sharper at all ISO’s, from 200 to 6400. D3 files DO sharpen better though, you can apply stronger sharpening without introducing artifacts or noise.’
Quoting from
http://www.photos-of-the-year.com/articles/d3-vs-5d/
July 21st, 2008 at 1:36 am
I think it is Nikon that leaves more room for post-processing by not sharpening the image too much. A lot of D300 users experienced that ’soft image’ syndrome. When the optimum level of sharpening is applied, the image is razor sharp!
September 9th, 2008 at 4:09 am
5d vs d700 ?
are you kidding me?
of course 5d is better. anything can be done by post processing using the computer.