5D3 vs D800 - highlight vs shadow recovery

Horshack wrote:

Highlight headroom is a function of how the camera meters middle relative to saturation. So there's no such thing as one camera/sensor having better highlight recovery than an other; it's just a metering preference built into the cameras' firmware. Once you've calibrated your camera's meter relative to saturation/clipping (including the use of UniWB for ultimate precision) you can expose to derive the full DR of the sensor. Total "headroom" of shadows, midtones, and highlights is just total DR and you can look to DxoMark to establish what those differences are.