The issue is
this is what you can get relative to other manufacturer's APS-C sensors. The dynamic range in m43 is certainly usable, but it's still pretty far off from what's available in other formats.
Ummmmmm, no.
So you'd rather have a graph of a bunch of numbers telling you the MFT DR is on a par with a FF camera, than look at photos that demonstrate the actual performance difference between three MFT camera and an APS-C camera. Personally I'd rather have the camera that produced the top-right image from the same lighting conditions.
There are some problems with both data sets. I suspect that the main problem with the DR graph is that it is reporting engineering DR at the pixel level. This tells you nothing useful about how a picture will look. DxOMark publishes both pixel-level DR and normalized figures that give one an idea of how the single-pixel DR will translate into the look of a displayed image of a certain size and pixel count.
This pixel level DR is about as useless in describing the look of a final image as is the lp/mm measurements of image sharpness provided by Lens Top. To get an idea of how sharp the images from two different formats of lens/sensor combination will produce, you need to multiply the lp/mm figure by the heights of the respective sensors in mm. This will give you lp/ph which is an apples-to-apples measurement for comparing sharpness of images produced by different systems.
Similarly, one needs to compare DR figures normalized by a particular pixel count and image size to get an idea of how the DR effects of two different formats on final images will compare. The four crops compared in whumber's post are normalized to be the same portion of the scene. Thus the four crops in his post give a much better representation of the effect of the DRs on the quality of images produced by the compared systems at their base ISOs.
There are some problems with the comparison in whumber's post however. They show a comparison at base ISO, but the baseISO s of the three MFT systems seem to be 200, while the base ISO of the APS-C system is 100. This means that the APS-C system was given a stop more exposure. This results in 1 Ev more DR. One could also have compared the results from images taken at ISO 200 on all four systems. Then the difference in DER, though still in favour of the APS-C camera, would not have been as great.
One compares at base ISO because it is notionally the best each camera can do. However, all the MFT cameras have extended low ISO settings, and all have more highlight headroom at base ISO than the APS-C camera. So one could actually do a fraction of a stop better with the MFT cameras by using a fraction of a stop of extended low ISO.
Finally, the DPR exposure latitude test is a bit of a rough-and-ready way to measure. If one were actually faced with such low light levels as are used in the test, one would likely use an ISO setting above base. On these cameras, this would have the effect of increasing the SNR by a little bit. This in turn would increase the DR a little bit.
Despite these reservations I have about the DPR tests, they are still far more representative of the difference in DR abilities of the tested cameras as tehy affect imag output.
