Hey, before any of you flame me, look at the pictures by Maurice
and tell me what you think?
I think they aren't so bad; a big step in the right direction from
pretty much ANY digital camera on the market, except the D60, 1Ds,
and specialized systems that are only good for astrophotog.
Look at the full-sized images. The first thing you see is that the
image is covered with specs. It's to the point that they seriously
detract from the image. I think we can all agree on that. They'll
downsample away and make great web images, but the spots will
definately show up on a print. But look around the
rest of the
image; there's no noise at all. Detail looks okay, but flat areas
aren't any noisier than they would be at 1/1000th sec. So at least
if you're able to get your exposure
before the hot pixels show
up, it should look great. In this four minute exposure, though,
there are
way too many specs to clone out by hand...
At 100%, my D60's images look a little better than this after a 20
minute exposure. The extreme right edge of the frame has that
magenta cloud, so I'm forced to compose for an 8x10, but if I do
that, I can get wonderful web-sized photos up to 45 minutes so far,
and good prints up to five to ten minutes. I start noticing a few
specs in my images around five minutes, the bar starts to show up
at some point before ten minutes, and the specs get progressively (
but slowly ) worse from there. My prints show the specs, and I'd
say there starts to be enough of them to be a distraction around
ten or fifteen minutes.
This is my D60 at ISO 100 for 20 minutes, at f/5.6:
This is ISO 200 for 8 1/2 minutes, at f/4:
( Sorry -- there just wasn't any light to work with...! )
And, for reference, this is ISO 100 for 30 seconds, I think f/16:
