DSLR Comparison Test 1
I recently got a Nikon D300, and quickly started to think it was perhaps overexposing. Shooting flowers side by side with my D200 was giving me differences I could not explain. The D200 shots were
... what I expected, but the D300 shots were too bright. I've been looking into this, and I decided to try a test to see how the camera did compared against the other Nikons I had available for a
test (D70s, D80 and D200).
Test Conditions:
I simply took one picture each of a pot of flowers in my kitchen, using incandescent lighting. I wanted to have all cameras be set the same way, so I:
-Used the same lens (Nikon 50F1.8)
-Used Manual mode
-Metered with a Sekonic incident meter
-Set all four cameras to ISO 400
-Used the same aperture (F2.8)
-Used the same shutter speed (1/6th of a second)
-Shot in RAW mode
-Used a sturdy tripod, trying to get the same angle of view on each camera. I should have taken off the vertical grips on the D200 and D300 shots, so they are slightly higher than the D70s and D80
shots.
-Set all cameras to Auto white balance (but post-processed all to Incendescent with CaptureNX to have them look consistent. D300 did a good job of Auto, but the others varied. Unfortunately I
accidentally deleted the NEF originals).
-Turned of D-light, Noise Reduction, and set all cameras to Neutral or Factory Defaults.
-Turned off RAW Baseline adjustments (except color balance)
-Saved as JPEG in highest quality mode
What I see is that the D300 looks lighter than the rest. EXIF data is present in the JPEG files. THESE images are RESIZED, but you can see the original full-size JPG's by clicking on the images.
D70S Test Shot - click on image for full-size file.
D80 Test Shot - click on image for full-size file.
D200 Test Shot - click on image for full-size file.
D300 Test Shot - click on image for full-size file.
Make your own judgements. I will try to repeat this test at some point and make the NEF files available.
