I’ve been shooting weddings in Hampshire, Dorset for about 8 years now and in that time I’ve used a lot of different cameras, both film cameras (Canon) and digital (Canon and Nikon).
I started off shooting canon digital exclusively.. more of this in an upcoming post. The last few years I’ve been shooting both Canon and Nikon dSLRs. This started with the frankly amazing Nikon D3 which was unsurpassed at the time in terms of image quality and build/AF performance giving me some really beautiful images, then Nikon released their D3s which after trialing one on load from Nikon UK I then upgraded to and sold my Nikon D3.
During this time I was shooting a Canon 1DS mark3 alongside it, a 21mpx full frame digital body with superb image quality and brilliant Autofocus too. The nikon still had the slight edge as an overall camera, but, shooting both allowed me to offer my clients the best of both systems (again i’ll go into this in more detail in another blog post coming up about whats in my bag).
Anyway a good friend of mine Rich Meston of Reikan Photography recently got a Canon 5D mark 3 – this is a very interesting beast, it has the same AF module (pretty much bar a couple of features) as canons brand new flagship EOS 1DX, but at half the cost. It comes with dual card slots for backup and boasts a much improved high ISO image quality… at least these are the specifications and it’s what a lot of Canon 5D mark 2 shooters had been asking for (myself included). So real kudos to canon for basically selling a mini-1DX and I’m sure a lot of people will be dying to get their hands on one (well if it wasn’t for the UK £3,000 price tag!)
Anyway – the purpose of this short blog post is to see how the canon 5d mark 3 compares to the Nikon D3S.. specifically when it comes to High ISO image quality which as a wedding photographer means that the images are of better quality for my clients… (i’ll be posting some other thoughts and impressions on AF and handling later when I get chance)
So the conditions for this test are as follows:
I met up with Rich and Bob (Whetton) at an unnamed car-park in an unnamed location, here we proceeded to take some test shots and evaluate each camera.
We came up with setting the cameras on a tripod and us all standing against a wall, the light levels were such that we were getting ISO12,800 @ f/2.8 and 1/80th so we wanted to make sure we weren’t at the mercy of the camera shake (one less variable in sharpness).
The Canon 5D mark 3 had the amazing 35/1.4L mounted and the Nikon D3S had the 35/2 lens which is also a great performer.
These shots were both brought into Photoshop CS5 with the latest ACR beta plugin which allows 5D3 files to be read. I white balanced both using the WB tool against the wall to give both the same look, then did a similar crop of 900px on the long side (this is the longest my blog allows) to allow for comparison.
Here are my conclusions.
Both the Nikon D3S and the Canon 5D mark 3 produce brilliant files considering the light levels here (we’re in a car park at night!). Both had no trouble focussing. The files are both very close, to me on my screen the D3S has a slight edge in detail on Rich Mestons jumper, the fabric seems to retain more detail whereas the 5D3 seems to lose a bit here, but, it’s marginal and could be too long staring at my monitor…
Let me know what you think in the comments section below:
