Nikon D700 versus Canon 5D
The reason for the change in the look of Sushicam is because I just mapped the sushicam.com URL to my 2yen.wordpress.com account. I did this to try and prevent the continual hacking that I experience from disrupting the site even more.
I no longer have to worry about keeping my WordPress installation current on my own server anymore. I can rely on the good people at WordPress.com to take care of that for me. In doing so I do loose some of the freedom that hosting your own website allows, but I think its a small price to pay to stop the hackers from continualy disrupting the site.
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Well, another weekend has come and gone. As sit here at my keyboard the clock is sweeping quickly toward 9 p.m. and all too soon I’ll have to head off to bed.
Yesterday I spent some time in Tokyo shooting my new D700. It was my first real chance to get out and do some shooting with it since it arrived a little less than a week ago. So far I can say this coming from the 5D: The high ISO image quality of the D700 is nothing short of extraordinary. I set it for auto-iso, ranging up to 6400, and forget about it. With the 5D I rarely went as high as 1600. It really is a big step up for me, especially since I love to shoot in “available darkness”.
I’d say as a baseline the D700 has about a 2-stop advantage compared to the 5D. But in reality, the quality of the noise from the D700 is much better.
I’m not sure exactly how the engineers over at Nikon achieved it, but the chroma noise on the D700 is extremely low.
I mean Really low.
Think “Danny-Devito-doing-the-Limbo” kind of low and you’ll get an idea of how low I am talking about.
At a given ISO the 5D has much higher chroma noise, and this leads to the greenish-purplish blotches that are so noticable and really degrade the image quality. In contrast the D700 noise is almost entirely constrained to Luminance, and this allows it to look a lot more like film grain instead of digital nosie.
I guess the big question is this: will the D700 replace my 5D?
I would have to say no, not entirely.
I still love to use all of that great manual focus glass I have aquired over the years, and the EOS mount of the 5D is the ultimate in verstaility in this department.
Which one would I choose if I could only have one of them?
This question is a bit harder. I’m currently loving the D700. But the 5D has been a real workhorse over the past 3 years, producing great looking images for me. I guess I will only really know the answer to that one once I have more time to shoot with the D700.
