Re: EOS 7D Mark II & Photokina
jrista said:
Are there any reasons why you wouldn't buy Nikon? Aside from their awesome DR...there are a number of reasons why they are not as good an option as Canon. I've listed them so many times now, I'm not going to again...however, I'm sure your reasons are the same as mine for preferring Canon.
Your statement embodies the core frustration with Canon, though. Why the hell am I shooting Canon when there are other brands with more resolution?
My question is: Why can't I have it all in a single brand? Why does everyone find it so "odd" that someone wants that? :-\
We share the same sentiment here. Camera companies are far too slow to innovate and disrupt. Sony is at least trying, at least partially, if not mostly, because they literally *have* to in order to make a dent in the market.
That's at least partially why we can't have everything in one camera.
And I don't know that you can particularly blame them. The market itself looks like it's shrinking. And companies need to do what they need to do to survive. That said, from a consumer perspective, I can't help but be pleased when I see companies innovate for their customer base.
But a bigger reason - IMHO - is b/c they really can't predict all use-cases. And ideas propagate slowly within complex organizations. Which is why, eventually, whoever opens up their cameras and crowd-sources function/app-development will have a huge impact in this regard. I think, anyway.
Are there any reasons why I wouldn't buy Nikon? Not any compelling ones anymore. I guess I'd say:
[list type=decimal]
[*]Lack of non-central cross-type AF points
[*]The wireless flash system w/ the 600EX-RT
[*]That wonderful new Canon 16-35 f/4L IS (I'm sure hoping that Sigma 14-24 rumor is true; I don't like the ergonomics of the Nikon 14-24 that makes practical use of filters impossible)
[/list]
Ultimately, though, those aren't compelling enough to overcome the poor DR, FPN, banding, lower resolution, and utter lack of any reasonable AF tracking capabilities in 3D (meaning, the X-Y 2D plane as well as the depth axis).
And before someone brings up how the DR evens out at high ISO - no it doesn't, not if you shoot in an 'ISO-less' manner where you can maintain somewhere near the full base ISO DR at higher ISOs simply by not allowing your ISO to float (assuming quantization error does not become a factor). But that's far too much to get into here. Incidentally, this type of shooting is exactly what you hounded me for doing when you de-railed that thread years ago where I compared the D800 to the 5DIII. About underexposing 5 stops & then pushing in post. Funny enough - that's exactly what I do right now in certain situations with my A7R in certain high DR scenes where I'm light limited b/c of the shutter speeds and/or aperture I wish to use. And it's likely to be the way cameras work in the future. Again, too much to get into here, but I'm guessing you know exactly what I'm referring to. As I said in my follow-up comment years later on that thread - underexposing 5 stops is nothing for some sensors these days. The only noise cost you pay is a tiny bit of quantization error (that's probably irrelevant) and mostly just the shot noise cost you'd pay anyway if you shot ISO 3200 (5 stops less exposure than ISO 100). Anyway.
Let me address that comment about AF tracking I made above. To be frank: I wish I'd tested Nikon's 3D AF tracking a long time ago. I use it in a bit of an unintuitive way - to avoid the focus issues arising from focus & recompose changing your plane of focus. Instead of moving the AF point using the antiquated joystick/D-pad method (far too slow), I let the camera automatically track the subject I initiate focus on using the center AF point. The only Canon camera that can even attempt this is the 1Dx, and even then it doesn't do it as well (in my tests) as the Nikon D800/D810/D4s - presumably b/c Nikon's been honing this for years. And then I have the added benefit that if the subject does happen to move while I recompose, the camera takes care of that as well. This did wonders for my baby photography, actually. I nailed shots focused on the eye of a wildly moving baby at f/1.4 - something I couldn't have dreamt of doing with my 5D3. Unless I stuck with a static AF point, of course, and manually recomposed to follow the eye/baby around such that the AF point was always over the subject of interest. 3D AF tracking obviates the need for this - allowing you to uncouple focus from the composition.
That's huge, to me.
It literally opens up shooting possibilities for wedding photography that no Canon camera - save for the 1Dx - can even dream to attempt.
And the same hardware that enables this allows for spot-metering all over the frame, and face-detection metering. Again, only the 1Dx can attempt this, but many Nikon cameras do this with either their 2k or 91k pixel RGB sensor. Even the D7000 tracks across the frame surprisingly well, with its limited resolution (2k) RGB sensor. The 91k pixel sensors do it better, but it's admirable that a camera like the D5300 can even do this at all. Compare that to a Rebel that can't even attempt to, and even if it could, it'd be of limited utility with 9 AF points.
I've shot Canon since the film era, including the 5D, 5D2, and 5D3. And I can honestly tell you that for my type of shooting, switching to the Sony A7 series and the D810 has opened up shot opportunities for me that I just couldn't imagine with my Canon cameras.
YMMV.
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