The new King of high ISO

Marli said:

http://www.fredmiranda.com/forum/topic/304631/1

Click to expand...

Sounds pretty good, it would be interesting to see a comparison with 20D and 5D, it would appear to be in the same ball park judging from these first quick samples.

Then again, we'll have to see:

• in various lighting conditions,
• what happens when the light is really low,
• how subtle colored patterns are rendered.

For now, I'll probably pre-order mine together with the 18-200 VR... this might be the "always-in-your-backpack" package for me.

Regards,
Bernard

Glad to see a performance like this. It is interesting to see that many people already assumed the D200 fells short on high ISO

This performance and price will kill 20D if Canon won't cut the price seriously. Let's hope Canon answer it with a better/cheaper model!

Cheers!
rh

Marli said:

http://www.fredmiranda.com/forum/topic/304631/1

Click to expand...

I hope it pushes the manufacturers further. One day we will have noiseless ISO 3200 and the ISO will just be another setting to change depending on what you are after..

When I went looking last year to upgrade from my Dimage A1 to a dslr I looked at the 20D, 300D and D70. I'll admit that from stricty a high iso standpoint the 20D was the benchmark of the 3. While I eventually decided on the D70 (because certain features of the D70 were of more importance personally to me) I kept hoping that one day Nikon would come out with an equivalent of the 20D from a 'noise' standpoint and with a reasonable price. I was somewhat disappointed with the D70s upgrade since there was no improvement in high iso quality or the amount of the buffer (I like raw and 4 pics isn't enough most times. For me, it's not so much a 'full-frame vs dx' sensor size issue as the feature set of the camera. That's why I'm pleased that the D200 is as rich in features that I like from the 20D, improved features from the D70, some from the D2X - and at least from these pics seems to be a very close competitor to the 20D in the high iso category. Of course, there will be more pics to see as time passes and there is still the focus speed ability that no one has remarked on as of yet. If these stay close to the 20D, then the D200 will be a fantastic bargain for those of us who have been envious of Canon sensor quality.

Bernard Languillier said:

Then again, we'll have to see:

• how subtle colored patterns are rendered.

Click to expand...

Yes, I certainly hope Nikon wouldn't just go over-aggressive on noise reduction to get these results on their new vice-flagship camera.

Lincoln
--
http://www.pbase.com/lwestfall/lens_tests

I was afraid that Nikon will be weak in the ISO department and I hope the tests will show otherwise.

That’s a great news for all of us as Canon will probably not get away now with slapping a bigger LCD on 20D and selling it next year as a 20DmkII for $1,700. They have to do much better than that now and I hope they will produce a very similar camera to this Nikon. Hopefully even better

You people are funny, talking like Canon is in the habit of producing sub-standard equipment. Of course, they would not "try to get away with slapping ..." anything. The 20D has not been definitively challenged by the D200, and the D200 is NOT at all cheap. OF COURSE Canon has their response in the works. Let us notice that the 5D poses a serious challenge to the far more expensive D2X, and count on the proven record of Canon to slap the snot outta' the D200 in a very short while.

All I can see are two small crops, both of which show very little of anything.

I will wait for a few more images before I put my 20D on ebay

--
'Your ideas intrigue me, and I'd like to subscribe to your newsletter'

http://www.pbase.com/timothyo

n/t

Available light examples instead of well lit flash pics would impress me more. I'm not convinced. Yet.

... you simply mean reducing resolution to also reduce visible noise. Whether you downsample intelligently, or use one of the various noise reduction software products (or embedd NR processing inside the camera) you can clearly clean up an image. Nikon does this in the D2X, apparently the D200, Fuji does it in the S3, and to a mild extent KM does it in the KM7D.

The difficult part is keeping the resolution.

In this universe you do not get something for nothing. For any given scene, through any given aperture, you will only get so many photos/sec/mm of sensor area.

Have you ever seen a reviewer plot resolution vs. "ISO"? Oh, you see plenty of graphs (some done better than others) of "noise" vs "ISO", but rarely if ever resolution vs "ISO" (which of course should be labeled "gain".) The reason is because doing so would be lots of work. However, Phil does, in his photos of the low contrast postage stamp, try to convey to the reader a sense of what is going on to get cleaner high gain (e.g., "high ISO") images.

Personally I find NR (of the random noise, not of any pattern noise which I think ought to be removed if possible...) in almost all cases to be aesthetically destructive, when viewing a large image. A small image on screen, downsampled from a much larger original, and then compressed in JPEG which itself reduces resolution (and thus fine noise) will hardly ever show the results of NR. Likewise a noisy (when viewed at 100% on screen) image will still look quite fine in a magazine, due to the limited abilty of the printing technology used by magazines.

And, as a side note, NR can not help you at all if you blew out the highlights due to a lowish saturation capacity of the sensor.

I'd bet if you estimated the noise of the D200 sensor simply by looking at other contemporaneous FFT CCDs with pixel pitches in the same neighborhood, and simply interpolate to the D200 pixel pitch size, that you would be close to the spec'd value (which may never be released.) Whatever processing that Nikon then does with the data is harder to predict, but they cannot create real information of the scene out of nothing, and so it remains to be seen how much detail is lost by the NR, not if their is loss of detail.

As a final note, the desirability of anything, and especially of these toys, is completely dependent upon the individual's own uses. The D200 even with a noticeably lower S/N than the 5D will still be the preferred tool for many individuals' particular uses, because for them a higher S/N simply is not needed, or the user simply accepts it as a necessary evil.

As such, don't hold your breath expecting very many of the Nikonians refusing to buy the D200 because of any noise issue... sure, a few will care because they have to and thus won't go for a D200, but I'd bet for 90% of all current Nikon owners, including film camera owners (since the D200 unlike the other non-pro Nikon DSLRs can use the older lenses), the D200 will be the object of lust.

Personally, I would not be suprised if during the first couple of months the D200 sales are much more than the 20D, and that the combined D50+D70s+D200 sales are greater than the 350D+20D sales.

-gt

subj typo: "Clean is easy if..." (nt)

D200 has a CCD which probabely noisier than even 350D, I had a Nikon D100 and I know Nikon cameras have a reputation for being noisy, so wait for samples before you judge

Read the pre-review on this site, you might get a suprise.
--
Ian the RF Cat.

RFCat aka irm
LOVE MY 10D
Have fun while learning digital photography.
http://www.pbase.com/ianm_au
equipment in profile

RF Cat said:

Read the pre-review on this site, you might get a suprise.
--
Ian the RF Cat.

RFCat aka irm
LOVE MY 10D
Have fun while learning digital photography.
http://www.pbase.com/ianm_au
equipment in profile

Click to expand...

Preview doesn't have anything about noise, the samples I saw immidiately reminded me of D100 response, excellent color but if you look at the deep shadows even in ISO100 there is moderate coarse grain noise, one problem with Nikon is the NEF files exhibit notricebly more noise if you sharpen them up, may be they have improved this in D200 though...

Hard to tell with just the one sample, but it looks like some heavy noise reduction was applied.

Regardless it still looks promising for Nikkon, and combined with their comittment to lens design for the APS format, it's looking pretty good for them.

Competition always leave us consumers as the winner..

Traveller

Well, it would seem though that the photographer had set noise reduction to off...

Regards,
Bernard

greentoe said:

As such, don't hold your breath expecting very many of the
Nikonians refusing to buy the D200 because of any noise issue...
sure, a few will care because they have to and thus won't go for
a D200, but I'd bet for 90% of all current Nikon owners, including
film camera owners (since the D200 unlike the other non-pro Nikon
DSLRs can use the older lenses), the D200 will be the object of
lust.

Click to expand...

Independantly of the validity of your arguments, I find it fascinating that you react to a post focussing on the good noise behaviour of the D200 by concluding that its noise problems might not impact its sales...

Cheers,
Bernard