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The Online Photographer has a very interesting post up comparing the Sony A900, the Nikon D3 and D700, and the Canon 5D Mark II. TOP usually doesn’t get into such potentially controversial territory — at least as far as camera brand loyalists are concerned — and it’s a very interesting post.

Luckily, to avoid pissing off any one faction on the Internet too much, Mike is able to recommend each of the cameras in one way or another. He says the Sony A900 wins for “the ultimate in image quality,” although he says that it’s not perfect for every kind of photography.

But between its staggering resolution and very good dynamic range, its willing response to the Exposure and Recovery sliders, and its more “photographic” image quality and lack of digital artifacts—and despite its less-than-accurate color—it’s the IQ emperor for now, among these four (i.e., the three under discussion and the D3).

But he also mentions that if you don’t need the A900’s whopping megapixel count, then it shouldn’t really be in the running.

Up next is the “most recommendable” camera, which he says is the Nikon D700.

Given its sensible size compared to the D3, robust build, fast autofocus, overall responsiveness, superior ergonomics, unmatched high-ISO performance, and perfectly sensible file size, it’s going to be the most bang for the buck for more photographers than either of the others. The Nikon is flat-out a better camera than the Canon, a point exemplified by its clearly superior autofocus performance…. my feeling is that it would help more photographers take better pictures in more situations than either of the other two.

That leaves the Canon 5D Mark II as the “best compromise” between the A900 and D700. The 5DMkII doesn’t have the almost-ridiculous resolution and detail of the A900, but it’s up there. It also doesn’t have the high ISO noise performance of the D700, but it’s good. And, while it isn’t as good as the two leaders in those categories (in this comparison) it’s overall much better balanced:

And here’s the thing: [the 5D Mark II] has much more resolution than the Nikon, and much better high-ISO capability than the Sony. So its win over the Nikon where resolution is concerned is bigger than the margin by which it loses to the Sony in the same department, and its win over the Sony in high-ISO performance is much more decisive than the margin by which it loses to the Nikon on that score.

So if you giving each camera a score in both image quality/detail and high ISO capabilities, the 5D Mark II wouldn’t win either of those categories, but if you add them up to give you a total overall score, it would win. He makes sure to point out that he’s ignoring the strong video capabilities of the Canon 5D Mark II, so if you have a use for HD video in your DSLR, this becomes a much easier decision to make.

Then come the image quality issues with the 5D Mark II, which include some unusual chromatic aberration results that I haven’t seen mentioned in other reviews so far:

It’s been eight or 10 years since “purple fringing” (also called “CA,” not entirely accurately) first heaved into our collective consciousness as a peculiarly digital anomaly, and since then, other artifacts have been dealt with in their turn. I don’t see much in the way of purple fringing at all from the 5D Mark II, but there’s what Carl Weese calls “blue replacement,” by which narrow objects imaged against a brighter background change from their own color into a darkish pastel hue. You see it most often in twigs and telephone lines. The 5D Mark II isn’t particularly bad, but it shows up a lot more than it does from the D700. And its susceptibility to blue replacement makes it a candidate for a lovely lens aberration that I’d never actually seen before in a picture I’ve taken myself—longitudinal chromatic aberration (LoCA), which shifts objects in front of the plane of best focus to magenta and those in back of the plane to green.

There’s a sample photo from the 5DMkII showing all sorts of ugly purple and green branches, which makes me feel a little bit ill inside. I’ll try not to lose my lunch all over your shiny new cameras.

Mike also feels that Canon’s noise is blotchier than other cameras, and says that the highlight clipping is harsher and “less fixable” on the 5DMkII than on other recent cameras, and describes it as the kind of thing we would have seen a few years back. And, of course, the much-discussed black dot problem to the right of blown highlights. Mike somehow manages not to turn into a raving photography forum inhabitant with his reasonable downplaying of the black dot issue:

This doesn’t bother me at all—you’d never see it in prints and you probably wouldn’t notice it if it were visible—but hey, I’m just a reporter, I gotta report what I see.

I think we can be reasonably certain that Canon will fix this in a future firmware update.

Overall, a very interesting comparison between three excellent cameras, and I recommend everyone go visit the site and read the full review.

Yes, that’s a little weird, but it’s true. Michael Johnston of The Online Photographer used to be a big lens connoisseur. However, then they became so consistently good and less unique and interesting, and he lost some of that interest. Luckily — for him, not so much for everyone else — Nikon sent him the AF-S VR Zoom-Nikkor 24–120mm f/3.5–5.6G IF-ED lens when they shipped him a Nikon D700 to review. And he sure has some choice words about the quality of the lens. Check out his post, or just enjoy these highlights:

• It’s a piece of shit.
• Despite its fancy specs, this is for all intents and purposes a perfect throwback to the days when even good zooms couldn’t aspire to the performance of ordinary garden-variety primes. Its performance is for all the world like an early-’80s mid-level zoom—smack dab in the middle of the era in which zooms earned—and deserved—their still-lingering bad reputation.
• It has flagrant amounts of linear distortion not only at its wide setting but well into the middle range, and apparent perspective distortion even near the middle of the frame(!).
• The D700 could hardly focus the thing—I got more out-of-focus shots than I have with any AF lens in years
• Its sharpness is lackluster. At 120mm, I don’t think the thing gets sharp. At least, not without stopping down further than I was able to.
• The deterioration in performance toward the corners is often marked—and not just at the extreme corners, either.
• Color transmission borders on sucky (I know this from having recently used the 24–70mm f/2.8 on the D3).
• This is a very inexpensive lens that is not worth half of what it costs.
• If you innocently purchased one of these and are not lucky enough to be using it on a DX sensor, try to get your money back if you possibly can. Otherwise, stop down and avoid the extremes of the zoom range, even though they’re probably why you bought the thing in the first place.
• The VR doesn’t even work very well. It works, but it’s the least effective image stabilizing I’ve yet experienced.

So, there you go. Avoid the lens like something super scary that you should run away from, and be happy that Mike has renewed his interest in lens quality!

Nikon has officially announced the D3x today, and the Internet is, well, less than thrilled. Seriously, I can’t remember the last time I saw a camera announcement get so badly blasted by photographers around the net so quickly.

First, the specs. The Nikon D3x is an upgrade to the Nikon D3, with the biggest difference being the resolution being upped from 12 megapixel full-frame on the D3 to 24 megapixel full-frame on the D3x. Then there are some odd areas where the D3x has poorer specs than the D3:

• Burst shooting speed drops from 11 fps to 7 fps
• The D3’s ISO range was 200-6400, plus HI1 and HI2. The D3x gives you 100-1600, plus HI1 and HI2, which surely won’t be as “hi” as the D3’s famous boosted ISO settings

And then the biggie, which is why everyone’s complaining: the price. The D3x will have a list price of $8,000 — $3,000 more than the D3. And that’s three times the list price of the 21 megapixel Canon 5D Mark II ($2700 retail price.) I’m not sure who the target audience is that Nikon thinks will spend that kind of money on more pixels — maybe medium format photographers looking for something different? Here are a few samples of other people around the net wondering about Nikon’s pricing strategy for the D3x.

Thom Hogan writes

We can’t talk about the D3x without talking about the D3 and pricing. D3 prices have been collapsing for some time. That’s despite the fact that Nikon has not lowered the price to dealers (at least here in the US; not 100% sure about the rest of the world). That’s a sign of very weak demand, as in at least one advertised price I could find, the dealer was selling below what they paid for the product. Now we get a camera that is really only different in the sensor (and FX sensors cost basically the same to manufacturer, no matter what the pixel count on them [yes, there's probably a modest yield difference, but not enough to justify much of a price change]), yet we have a substantive price increase. Anyone else see the problem with this picture? Nikon’s asking us to pay more for the equivalent. I say equivalent because you can look at it this way: you can buy the same camera with either high ISO and dynamic range improvements, or you can have it with more pixels. For some reason, more pixels costs US$3000. Really?

[...]

Nikon has a big problem with the D3x, I think. It’s last to the market (FX, high resolution), with everything riding solely on the sensor. And they’re asking a huge price for it. At US$4999 the risk of failure wouldn’t have been very large. At its US$7999 price, it really needs to perform beyond expectations for it to shore up the top side of Nikon’s lineup. On the plus side, the pixel-deprived Nikon shooters will initially appreciate the part of the camera that addresses that issue, but I wonder whether it’s enough to make the D3x a winning product.

Ken Rockwell:

Nikon wants eight grand for this $5,500 camera, based solely on image quality, however the D3X’ image quality ought to be about the same as (maybe worse than) the $2,700 Canon 5D Mark II. The D3X ergonomics are far superior to Canon, but the D3 has the same ergonomics as the D3X, but for half the price and with twice the frame rate and four times the ISO of the D3X.

Michael Reichmann at Luminous Landscape:

It seems to me that at a $3000 premium over the otherwise almost identical D3, and at some $5000 more than the Canon 5D MKII and Sony A900, the pricing of the Nikon (especially in our current crisis economy) is simply out to lunch. A $1,000 premium I could have understood. Maybe even, $1,500. But with only more megapixels on offer I simply find the D3x to be financially out of tune with the realities of today’s marketplace.

Good luck, Nikon! Nobody seems to happy with this one so far…

Nikon has announced the Nikon D700. And there was much rejoicing in Nikonland. The D700 will be very similar to the Nikon D3, keeping the D3’s full frame (“DX” in Nikon terminology) 12.1 megapixel CMOS sensor. The body size is closer to the Nikon D300, though, making this a nice compact (in DSLR terms, of course) full-frame camera, smaller and lighter than the D3. It has a cheaper shutter than the D3, rated to 150,000 cycles instead of 300,000, only has one card slot, and doesn’t have the rear LCD info screen due to the smaller body size.

The usual bunch of features, 3″ high resolution LCD, live view, UDMA flash card support, HDMI output, etc. The viewfinder sounds especially nice and large compared to most other DSLRs.

And, right on time, DPReview has a hands-on preview of the D700. There’s not a whole lot of commentary, but if you want to see every menu on the camera and a whole lot of glamour shots, it’s worth a look.