After the first hour of use, all I can say is this
GRAB any 35/1.4, 50/1.2, or whatever lens you have on your wishlist and intend to deploy on a D3, BEFORE prices skyrocket !!!! I'm almost dumbfounded and that's not something I experience very often. Not even my 8/2.8 fisheye shows any sign of CA illness.
Whatever wizardry Nikon concocted for the D3, it obviously works."
Quelle: http://nikongear.com/smf/index.php?topic=6792.0;all
Well, no written guarantee from me yet. It seems that there is something weird going on when the focal length drops below 24 or so. Depending on the lens design, you can have very severe fall-off so getting even illumination needs stopping down quite a bit or might not even be acceptable to the EXPEED processor inside the D3. Thus, the 15/5.6 consistently gave "Err" and the 18/3.5 was severely vignetted. The 16/2.8 Fisheye was unproblematic.
I think there is a definite reason for Nikon's decision to produce the 14-24, which does NOT show any fall-off whatsover at 20-24mm, and only a very slight corner darkness at 14mm wide-open (disappears stopped down 1 or two stops).
So, prepare to add the 14-24 if you're into wide-angle photography, keep the fisheye(s) and all lenses 28 or longer. The borderline range 20-24 needs much more in-depth testing to clarify what's going on.
What amazes me the most is the low incidence of CA with the D3. It simply has disappeared in virtually all situations. Strange.
I'd like to elaborate the last point a little. On the D2X, using a wide PC lens (28, 35) and shifting or tilting to the full extent resulted in very severe one-sided vignetting, heavy assymmetric CA, and in some cases, an extreme loss of sharpness all over the frame. With the D3, these issues are very much reduced, however, if the lens is shifted to its extreme limits there will be a peripheral zone where all sharpness disappears and some vignetting occurs. The troubled zone appears quite abruptly when you examine the image frame into the corners. This might be alleviated by stopping down, but I haven't gotten that far in my test procedures yet.
What we observe is probably the consequence of the new sensor array design of the D3, with its double (micro) lenses, There is a limit to the angle of incidence that the photosites will accept. This again is the likely reason why extreme wide-angle lenses of the "old school" fare badly and even (in case of the 15/5.6) might be not accepted by the camera. I'd like to repeat that it isn't the focal length as such that is important, or the picture angle, but how the lens interacts with the imager inside the camera. Obviously the wizardry inside the D3 is busy counting bits and adjusting the final outcome.
The 14/2.8 does quite well in fact, but there is some vignetting and traces of blue fringing towards the corners. I'll rerun it later. The 17-35 looks OK, but I'll do a further test run to see whether it drops in corner quality as the picture angle widens.
I think the recommended approach is simply to bite the bullet and get the 14-24 which is a match made in heaven for the D3. One can hardly get a better demonstration of the ingenuity that underlies the D3 concept.
You read me wrong. The 17-35 isn't *bad* at all. There might be some vignetting at 17mm, but no serious issue has been encountered so far.
I did "rush" tests on a number of lenses and only when I got to some less likely candidates for D3 did the vignetting show up. So I wan't prepared for that issue from the onset.
I'm running a quick test of 50-60 lenses during this week to learn what does and what doesn't work well on the new camera. I also received a D300, so there are cross-platform comparisons to run as well. Already getting the first signs of a headache.
I plan to test about 50 of the Nikkor lenses during this and the following week. All your questions will be addressed - in due time. Besides the usual standard set of lenses, I'll run a few of the more exotic ones, plus the Micro-Nikkors of course. I'll do 14-24 vs 17-35 and 24-70 vs 28-70 in a few days.
Today has been a little hectic due to the need to clarify how the D3 responds to different kinds of lenses. I had only a few hours of daylight in which to run tests. Tomorrow I'll modify an "L" bracket to accomodate the camera so it can thrive better on my tripods and will do A/B tests against D2x first, the D300 later.
I set the jpg quality to the most neutral settings and Adobe RGB. I shoot NEF + jpg fine and use NX 1.3 on an XP machine to open the files. I'm forwarding NEFs to Eric Hyman of Bibble Labs so he can initiate his research on the file format(s) for a new version of Bibble Pro. Honestly I dislike NX so can't wait to get rid of it.
Well, what word do you think is aptly describing the discovery of how sharp a 35/1.4 really is, even wide open?
The 28/2 seems to work very well on D3, but there is a little unsharpness into the extreme corners at close range and wide apertures.
I just verified that given an equal detail magnification, DOF is absolutely identical whether a DX camera, DX crop on the D3, or the FX/D3 is used to capture the image. Nice to validate theory. The full equation hints at this result, but most people deny it.
Lloyd Chambers:
I'm having trouble making acceptable photos with the D3, everything seems soft and just not "there".
Bjørn Rørslett:
I wouldn't say "soft and not quite there", but it is not hard to show that D2X at the same detail magnification produces images with better microdetail (however, bigger structures might not be equally well defined). so the overall effect being sometimes the one, sometimes the other, showing the best overall result.
When I shot the first set of comparisons I made a note to remind me how smooth and delicate the D3 image was when the D2X (at 100ISO) looked more grainy. Afterwards I discovered the D3 had been set to 400ISO.
I think the subject will largely dictate the outcome. But we are seeing the same principle that made the Canon 1DS Mk.2 look less sharp than the D2X (my D2x review) if we equalise comparisons on the field of view captured by the respective camera by using different lenses. The same lens on both D2X and D3, and keeping the detail magnification identical, might show almost no difference at all (except for the lower noise of D3).
Pixel density i(photosites per area unit) s lower on the D3 and there are advantages and drawbacks with this compared to D2X.
The first D3 advantage obviously is a vastly improved noise performance, the second that the combination lens + camera can achieve higher image contrast thus imparting a better sharpness for the "big details" that give the overall impression of sharpness of the image, the third (deriving from the second) is that the files stand much better enlargement. The almost total lack of CA and the even illumination of [some, not all] wide-angle lenses might result from the sensor design or the EXPEED processor, or both.
Now, to the drawbacks. It is clear that with high-performance lenses, D3 might have insuffcient resolution due to its lower pixel density. Whether or not this is an issue will depend on the subject and scene contrast, and also the processing of the file done in-camera. Shooting people with D3 should yield remarkable image quality, landscape shouldn't.
Since Nikon positions the D3 as a press, sports, or action photographers camera, and never said it was *the* solution to all needs, I think we. the end user community, have been intoxicated by the remarkable low noise/high-ISO performance and falsely assumed this would be the *ultimate* camera for every conceivable application. It is not. When a high-resolution companion to the D3 arrives, neither will that model be the "best" for sports and action shooting. But it will marvel for studio and landscape work.
My final comment is that the benefits of the DX format still are very much in existence after the arrival of the D3.
Danke Volker, genau darum ging es mir. Wenn ich bei beiden Kameras den selbem Bildwinkel/Bildausschnitt wähle (also unterschiedliche Brennweite) sollte es auf das selbe rauskommen.
Aber ist so ein Vergleich, mit Verlaub gesagt, nicht etwas dummsinnig ?Das ist genau der Punkt:
Björn bezieht sich bei der Aussage auf seinen Vergleich zwischen der D2X und der Canon 1Ds mark II - im review der D2X ganz hinten und Ziffer 8. Dort vergleicht er beide Kameras mit angesetztem 2.8/300mm vom gleichen Standpunkt aus. Es ist also ein unterschiedlicher Bildwinkel, und wenn man daraus denselben crop nimmt, hat die Kamera mit dem größeren Crop-Faktor die höhere Auflösung. Vorausgesetzt, das Objektiv kann mit dieser höheren Auflösung umgehen, bekommt man mit der crop-Kamera unter diesen Bedinungen eine bessere Detailzeichnung.
So meint er es wohl.
...
Sehe ich ebenso. Er hat ja dann später den Vergleich mit 200/2 VR auf der D2x und dem 300/2.8 IS auf der 1DS II gepostet.Aber ist so ein Vergleich, mit Verlaub gesagt, nicht etwas dummsinnig ?
Sehe ich ebenso. Er hat ja dann später den Vergleich mit 200/2 VR auf der D2x und dem 300/2.8 IS auf der 1DS II gepostet.
Gruss
Thilo
Kannst Du bitte kurz sagen, wo? Habe wohl Tomaten auf den Augen.
Danke Volker, genau darum ging es mir. Wenn ich bei beiden Kameras den selbem Bildwinkel/Bildausschnitt wähle (also unterschiedliche Brennweite) sollte es auf das selbe rauskommen.
Volker, wärest Du so freundlich, das zu übernehmen? Du hast doch mit ihm schon Kontakt gehabt, oder?
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