ISO comparison part I: Nikon D300s vs Nikon D700

Both the Nikon D300s and D700 are said to have very good high ISO performances. From my day-to-day photography I would support this immidiatly, but how good are they really ? I set up a little test environment to check it out.
Both cameras were mounted on a tripod and I used the new Nikon 24-120 1:4G VR lens. Aperture was set to f/9, internal settings of the cameras were set to default and pictures were shot as RAW files.

The colorful cans have some tricky shadows and proved very valuable for the ISO test

The regular ISO range of the Nikon D300s goes from ISO 200 up to ISO 3200, with ISO 100 available as L 1 and ISO 6400 and Hi 1. The D700 offers the range from ISO 200 up to ISO 6400, yet again with ISO 100 available as L 1 and ISO 12800 as Hi 1 and an incredible ISO 25600 as Hi 2.

The ISO chart - click for 100% image

The comparison shows nicely how the D700 benefits from its fullframe sensor and thus much larger pixelsize, when compared to the APS-C sized sensor of the D300s - both cameras have 12 megapixels.

The D300s performs very well up to ISO 800, with the first little noise appearing at ISO 1600. ISO 3200 and 6400 can be used, if the image is not to be used in fullsize and will be denoised. I would only use them however, if shutterspeeds are too low and any other solution is already exploited (faster aperture, flash).

As for the D700 I would say it performs two LVs (lightvalues) better than the D300s. ISO 3200 is as clean as ISO 800 on the D300s, with the first small amount of noise showing up at ISO 6400. You can use pcitures with these ISOs in fullsize and without denoising without loss of quality.
ISO 12800 compares to ISO 3200 on the D300s and when denoised still looks very clean. ISO 25600 really surprised me, not to say it absolutely impressed me! Yes, there is considerable noise when viewed in fullsize and you sure cannot use such a picture, when shooting very fine detail (I do a lot of horsephotography). But when denoised and scaled down, the images are stilll more than just usable. Check out the following picture!

50/50 - can you spot which half of the picture is ISO 25600?

The above picture is half ISO 200 and half ISO 25600. The ISO 25600 part was denoised using the Imageonic Noiseware Professional plugin (AKVIS Noisebuster produces similar results) and the saturation was increased slightly.

When using high ISOs on either camera, you should use Nikon's own ViewNX software to convert the RAW files into jpgs. I found out that there is a harsh difference between photos converted with ViewNX compared to images converted with Adobe's Camera RAW converter. Not only do pictures loose some sharpness, the noiselevel is far higher when using Adobe Camera RAW.

D700 at ISO 25600

This picture clearly shows the difference between the two RAW converters. The left image was converted using ViewNX, while the mid picture was converted with Adobe Camera RAW. The image to the right is the ViewNX converted photo, denoised with Noiseware - all images are 100% crops.


Stay tuned, I will perform the very same test with Canon's 5D Mk II and 7D soon.

Welcome to my little photoblog

I will use this little blog to post some how-to manuals and technical comparisons and tests of different photogear that I either use or can get my hands on. This is supposed to supplement my Flickr account, where a variety of my work can be found :O)
Hope you enjoy

Carsten aka "llama1910"