7D - D300 side by side

beetle8

I'm not an engineer, I have both cameras and thought this would be helpful for some people, I did my best to make this an accurate comparison.

For what it's worth, although I obviously just got the Canon and have some comfort level things that will take time. Here is my opinion on the two.

The focusing is still better on the Nikon at least in low light which is where I do most of my shooting. The focussing on the Canon is really good though. In my opinion the IQ is comparable, I think had Canon gone with a lower MP the IQ would've improved. But what do I know. I bought the Canon strictly for video, I'll continue to try it out here and there for stills, and who know once I get comfortable with it I might change my mind.

Here's the process,


Put the subject on black BG to help illustrate the noise at high iso.
Set up tripod and locked everything down.
Light is from glass slider behind camera (cloudy day) and a 5bulb chandelier above subject.
Canon is equipped with 50 f1.4 and Nikon has a 50 f1.8
Both cameras shot the subject at f2, both cameras were set to capture raw, all in camera processing was either off of set to standard. Spot metering was used on both cameras and I manually focussed both camera to the same spot the absolute best I could.
I mounted the 7D on the tripod and shot a test shot, with exposure zeroed the preview looked to light so I tried 1/3 under and went with that on all remaining shots.
I mounted the D300 to the tripod and set the exposure to 1/3 stop under, the previe looked too light so I adjusted to 2/3 under and went with that for the rest of the shots.
The shutter speeds ended up being the same for both on all exposures and are as follows; 1/13,1/25, 1/50, 1/100, 1/125, 1/160, 1/200
Both cameras were set on 2second shutter delay.

All raw images were imported into Lightroom under default import settings. From that point I zeroed the black slider, left the brightness at 50 and contrast at 25, shut off the curves and zeroed the sharpening and noise reduction. All images were exported to a file as 16bit Tiff's then imported into photoshop where I cut 100% crops from the corresponding iso's from each camera and placed them in a premade template. I tried to place the same point of the images at the center of the comparisons.

At that point each comparison was exported using the highest quality jpeg "web&devices" export to a file and each was uploaded to the web.

These are reduced for the forum, more iso's and full size --> Full size comps

Qarik

Thanks for the data point. About what I expected for 12M vs 18M.

Moogle Pepper

Interesting!

And when I first saw the title I thought I read "Dark Side" ...

yendikeno

Thanks
I've been wondering, and yours is the first head-to-head comparison I've seen.

ziggy53

Thanks Keith. I appreciate how much time these comparisons can take.

LiquidAir

One thing I notice about this comparison is that at f/2 the Canon 50/1.4 is clearly a better lens than the Nikon 50/1.8. That's not surprising given the difference in price (the Canon 50/1.8 is a more comperable lens), but for comparing cameras it might be better to shoot at f/8.

beetle8

LiquidAir wrote:

One thing I notice about this comparison is that at f/2 the Canon 50/1.4 is clearly a better lens than the Nikon 50/1.8. That's not surprising given the difference in price (the Canon 50/1.8 is a more comperable lens), but for comparing cameras it might be better to shoot at f/8.

Funny this test has made me consider returning the Canon 50 f1.4 the amount of chromatic aberation is beyond unacceptable. I'll be heading to the store and twisting on a 1.8 to see the difference, and probably returning f1.4.

I agree about the f8 but I opted for the considerably faster shutter speeds with the available light taken into account.