T3 ISO 1600 vs X-Pro1 ISO 3200, RAW.

Hello,

I am an amateur, I have a Canon T3 and I want to increase the speed of my system.

It is between the 35mm f/2 on my T3 or buying the new Fuji X-M1 with its much hyped X-Trans sensor with the 27mm f/2.8 prime.

In my mind the second alternative was much better for low light. But then I checked those sites where they’re shooting the same scene with all cameras. I ended up at focus-numerique.com, a French site, comparing the T3 raw file at ISO 1600 to the X-Pro1 raw file at ISO 3200.

I basically tried to make each file looking as good as possible, leaving a fine grain at 100% , as I’m always doing with my own photos. The results are comparable to the point where I’m not sure which one I prefer. The final settings are:

Fuji file: ISO 3200, Sharpening 60, NR Luminance 20, resized to match the T3 file resolution.

T3 file: ISO 1600, Contrast 20, Sharpening 50, NR Luminance 15.

All the other parameters are left unchanged (default) in LightRoom 5.

To my eyes the quality of the files is equivalent, which begs the question: is 1 stop (RAW) the whole difference between the old T3 and the much hyped Fuji sensors? Am I missing something here?

Just for the fun, looking at the 100% crops below say which one is the T3 file and which one the X-Pro file.

The crop on the right seems to be slightly out of focus. This has nothing to do with sensors so it's not important here.

The colors are different, which is to be expected.

Again the crop on the right is slightly out of the focus plane.

And again here.

Cheers, Virgil.