Quarkcharmed said:
dak723 said:
The presumed target consumer of every camera is dominated by people who couldn't care less about 3 or more stop shadow lifting. Only the DR "enthusiasts" who dominate forums such as this one care. Real photographers who take real pictures and know how to set the exposure are the target consumer and it is time for them to dictate the conversation about what is and what is not important in a new camera.
You you've ever really worked with high contrast scenes (that mostly applies to landscapes, but non-studio portraits, concert photography etc. are also in this category) you wouldn't have said that. DR is a very important metric and "proper exposure" doesn't help if the scene requires say 15 ev range and your camera is only 10 ev.
You can deal with 10-stop-DR-camera too but it doesn't mean professionals don't need greater DR.
When will the DRoning stop? :
The point dak723 is making is that
for the majority of buyers/owners of any given camera, DR is not a
primary concern. I haven't seen anyone here (seriously, at least) denying the utility of more DR. It's about placing the that utility into the context of overall system capabilities and performance...
for the majority. Sure, there are many people who are not in the majority, but most people are – by definition. If you doubt the conclusion that DR is not of primary importance to most buyers, please explain why Canon was the #1 ILC manufacturer 8 years ago – the year that Nikon sensors started delivering significantly more DR than Canon (as did Sony soon thereafter)...and Canon remains the #1 ILC manufacturer, with an even greater share of the ILC market than they had 8 years ago.
The whole 'shadow-lifting stress test' was a DPR-initiated phenomenon that seems to have come about about mainly for two reasons: 1) in recent years, cameras have simply gotten so good that there's little to differentiate them, and 2) DPR needed a way to differentiate them.
Please don't make the mistake of thinking your needs/wants represent those of the majority. If you crave more DR, good for you...so maybe you look at DxOMark's (biased) scores, and decide Sony is a great option. Someone else may highly value weather sealing, and look at Imaging Resorce's test where the Sony a7RIII failed for water ingress, or Roger Cicala/Lensrentals' teardown of the a7RIII showing it's very well sealed, except for the bottom of the camera which has no sealing whatsoever (portrait orientation, who uses that?), and decide that Sony is worthless as far as their needs go.
Personally, I'd never say no to more DR, and I've run into plenty of real-world situations where I needed more DR than my camera could capture. But...I've run into vanishingly few real-world situations where an additional 1-2 stops of DR would have been of significant benefit – the gap between scene DR and camera capability is usually much greater. But maybe you've just never worked with really high contrast scenes before. The five stops in your example, sure, that would make a difference. But that's not really a relevant comparison unless you're comparing a camera from >10 years ago with one from today.
As for your scene with 15 stops DR...which camera would you use to capture that full range? I have some that can, but they're research-grade cameras used in a laboratory setting. Today's ILCs cannot capture the full range of a 15-stop scene. Perhaps you've been a bit duped by DxOMark, since they typically report (calculated) DR following a (theoretical) downsampling to an 8 MP image. While that certainly does increase the DR of an existing image by reducing the noise floor, what it doesn't do is bring back DR that was lost at capture – the details that were not captured are gone.
