State of the art

I happened to visit dxomark.com and was surprised.

The DXO company produces a remarkably good software package for professional photographers that squeezes every bit of quality from the digital negatives, known as RAW files. If your wedding photographer says that he or she only shoots in jpg, doesn’t hire him or her. Jog image quality is severely compromised as the camera converts the image from the original RAW image it produces and saves the photography as a much smaller file, a jpg. Modern PCs are infinitely more powerful in their ability to squeeze out quality, and DXO is one of the best when they do the conversion and not the camera. Back to the story…

The DXOmark website shows the technical variables that go into the quality of the RAW files that each “pro” camera can produce, and the DXO Mark is a simple scale for the bottom line result. Here’s the surprise. The standard wedding photographers camera is in many instances the Nikon D300. It came out a few years ago and costs about $1,600 for just the body, without a lens. The new Nikon D5000 came out a few months ago, and its body sells for as little as $500 or about a third of the cost of the D300.

So you’d think that the image quality of the D300 will be up to three times better than the D5000 as they have the same 12.3 megapixel sensor size? Wrong, the D5000 is nearly 10% better at a quarter of the cost! Technology marches on, and very quickly. I know that the D300 has a better build and is more “heavy duty” (whatever that means to wedding photographers) than the D5000, but the D5000 has features that the D300 doesn’t have either.

So what’s the moral of the story? It’s that newly released cameras offer far better price/performance than the “old” cameras when comparing image quality versus cost. I’m not saying that the D300 is junk, but justifying its cost is getting more and more difficult even though it produces very high quality images.

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