HarveyG

The New Nikon D800 Offers Unrivaled Resolution and Features Designed for a Variety of Demanding Professional Photographic and Multimedia Disciplines, Videographers and Filmmakers

Nikon D800/D800E

Exciting news indeed. After months of watching and wondering, and 3.5 years after the D700, it’s here! I’ll be brief. After my debate of “Are more Megapixels better?” the D800 now sports a 36.3Mp CMOS sensor in Full Frame (FX) 35mm (35.9 x 24.0 mm). That is rivalling Medium Format…but with the choice of f/1.4 lenses where nearly all MF lenses start at f/2.8! The sensor is also completely redesigned and engineered by Nikon, and with Nikon’s legendary FX Format Low Light Low Noise characteristics, this is a leap forward in the evolution of the digital camera, especially in this format. Not just a small Mp progression…It allows unedited A1 size pictures without needing Fractal Software and amazing cropping options without degradation of pixel/image quality.

That’s a pixel density of 42,131 pixels per mm² and to all appearances it’s not at the cost of IQ, sharpness or noise, keeping in line with the high ISO, low noise tradition of all Nikon full frame DSLR’s from the D700 on up, and specifically the D3s.

(Owners of the remarkable Sigma SD1 Digital SLR Camera with the FOVEON  X3 – 46Mp will no doubt be wondering what all the hype is about…except maybe the price tag, however the SD1 has an APS-C 24 x 16mm small frame sensor and thus a pixel density of 119,791! Yes I know it has 3 stacked sensors (layers), each 4800 x 3200px but thus needs no AA filter (such as the D800E) and no coloured jaggies but with a slight increase in colour noise in low-light.)

As a reminder here are the current FX per mm² pixel densities (from my 2009 500mm Vivitar mirror-reflex-lens report):

Nikon D800/E 36,3Mp CMOS

All of the FX DSLR’s use a Nikon designed and built CMOS

D700—14,063 pixels/mm² (12.1 Mp FX 36.0 x 23.9mm)
D3 -–- 14,063 pixels/mm² (12.1 Mp FX 36.0 x 23.9mm)
D3s –- 14,063 pixels/mm² (12.1 Mp FX 36.0 x 23.9mm)
D3x –- 30,113 pixels/mm² (24.5 Mp FX 35.9 x 24.0mm)
D4 -–- 18,850 pixels/mm² (16.2 Mp FX 36.0 x 23.9mm)
D800—42,131 pixels/mm² (36.3 Mp FX 35.9 x 24.0mm)

I won’t add more tech gumf, as no doubt thousands of other blogs and websites have done so already however you can download the PDF brochure here (3.6MB) / Full D800/D800E Specifications here.

Despite all it’s new bells and whistles, this is the most intriguing and interesting aspect to me:

What is the difference between the D800 and the D800E or the D800 vs D800E? (Note: Both have the SAME resolution and SAME sensor at 36.3 Mp)

(continue reading…)

According to this MF photographer, there are limitations…

After receiving a newsletter from DP Review about the Phase One Mamiya – Leaf tie-up , one commentator, kb2zuz; (Kurt Heumiller)-USA, who shoots for the Yale Center for British Art, with a Hasselblad H3D-II 39 MS and H4D 50 MS, had this to say about the Medium Format  debate (added below for those without restricted internet access):

What are the mythical advantages of sensor size (or the often related larger pixels)? Less noise, better dynamic range, shallower depth of field. I work with an H4D every day, … I can tell you this, at anything over 50 ISO it has worse noise than any 35mm “full-frame” digital I’ve seen. It has only slightly better dynamic range (and again, that’s only at 50 ISO). Yes with the 120mm f/4 lens it will have a shallower depth of field than an 85mm lens on a full-frame at f/4, but you can get f/1.2 lenses for full-frame. Most MF lenses are f/2.8 or slower, there’s a couple f/2.2 lenses… so there goes the DOF advantage. I use medium format every day and there are reasons for it: multi-shot uninterpolated images, no AA filter, and high megapixels. That’s about it.

I’m no expert on MF, but I’ve long thought it would be better than FF or APS-C in all regards, at that sensor size, and I’ve seen jaw dropping images by MF photographers, but there are other factors I should have taken into consideration, (continue reading…)

I recently noticed a few shots online that had the dreaded dust bunnies in them and this prompted today’s posting. Note this only applies to DSLR or Medium Format with interchangeable lenses and mirror mechanisms, not to your mirrorless Point and Shoot or Bridge Camera UNLESS they have interchangeable lenses where the sensor is visible and prone to contamination.

A few days after I bought my Tokina 12-24mm f/4.0 ATX Pro DX, I was at the coast. With the intention to do UWA scapes with the D80 (It’s ISO 100 and long exposure is superb on the CCD). The camera is seldom used and I also rarely remove the Sigma 28-70mm f/2.8 that’s on it. Less lens changes, less dust, or so the theory goes. Camera has done under 6000 images in 4 years.

So I get up at 4am and head off to the local lake district in Sedgefield for a few pre-dawn landscapes. Take a few shots, chimp at the screen. Everything looks awesome (LCD’s always make everything look awesome…)

Get back to the apartment and fire up the laptop, offload the images…enlarge…and there they are…”dust” bunnies.

King Fisher River Lagoon - Dust Bunnies - Click Image for full size - Blue circle is a "Hot" Pixel - more on that in another posting.

What a waste of time! No wait, I can clone them out in PP. But still, what a waste of time if I had just spent a bit more time on checking the SENSOR pre-shoot. I honestly thought that because I rarely remove the lens (continue reading…)

Canon's 120Mp APS-H Sensor

Canon successfully develops world’s first APS-H-size CMOS image sensor to realize record-high resolution of 120 megapixels.

TOKYO, August 24, 2010—Canon Inc. announced today that it has successfully developed an APS-H-size^*1 CMOS image sensor that delivers an image resolution of approximately 120 megapixels (13,280 x 9,184 pixels), the world’s highest level^*2 of resolution for its size.

Compared with Canon’s highest-resolution commercial CMOS sensor of the same size, comprising approximately 16.1 million pixels, the newly developed sensor features a pixel count that, at approximately 120 million pixels, is nearly 7.5 times larger and offers a 2.4-fold improvement in resolution.^{*3 /} Read the full Press Release here.