Last evening, in a fit of boredom, (yeah right), I tossed the 6D, E-1
and E-3 on my neck and went for a sunset stroll around the yard. I was
curious how the three cameras really compared in my "golden hour"
light at base ISO. The 14-42 lenses were on the E-bodies and the 35-80
was on the 6D. I wasn't looking for an ultimate scientific comparison,
but I was looking for a "real-world" comparison. My test wasn't about
image sharpness, but about colors and general "poundability" of the
images in Lightroom. If I had a bigger neck, I would have also tested
the L1. I shot every scene with all three cameras with like settings.
Before I get into the Lightroom side of things, I wanted to mention
one thing which I've also read similar things in the various
discussion fora. The 6D just doesn't seem to be "with you". With or
without the silent mode, it just seems a fraction of a step behind.
Kinda like the L1 in that regard, but in an almost imperceptible way.
I didn't really notice it until I shot it directly against the E-3.
The E-3 is like a Jack Russell Terrier in comparison to the E-1 and
6D. As many people have speculated, it could be due to the feel of the
shutter release, but it could also be the nature of the camera.
OK, so what about the golden hour shots?
Running the raw conversions as natively as possible (compared with PSW
in a totally raw raw look for confirmation), this E-3 has a slight
greenish tint which normally disappears with the white-balance
correction, but in correcting, you are losing dynamic range and tonal
integrity. I've noticed this greenish tint before, but figured it was
due to the AWB algorithm and sensor in the E-3. But direct comparison
shows that the greenish tint is native to this particular sensor. It's
not a huge tint (5 magenta probably fixes it), but it does alter the
sky more than anything and does flatten the contrast a tiny bit.
The E-1 and 6D were incredibly close except the E-1 required the
typical 2/3 to 1 stop correction to bring the exposure up to match the
6D. The E-1's exposure is done to protect the highlights at the
expense of the shadows. More on that later. The 6D responded to
highlight recovery better than the E-1 as the E-1 loses color
integrity up there in the peaks. The E-1 does seem to be more
red-centric than the 6D which seems more magenta-centric. And when
clipping is reached, the two cameras definitely respond differently,
with the 6D being a bit better.
Comparing unmanipulated images is unhelpful to me because I never
leave anything alone anyway. So, for all three cameras, I did maximum
highlight recover, maximum shadow recovery, set the WB on a neutral
subject and cranked the white and black points to have peaks land at
the same point. I attempted to get the three sets of images to match
curves as much as possible. In other words, maximum destruction.
The E-1 and 6D remained remarkably close. While the 6D had better
highlights, but E-1 had better shadows. We won't really talk about the
E-3 because it wasn't even in the same league, with banding noise and
other artifacts kicking in. When kept at native/normal settings, the
E-3 is mighty fine, but doesn't allow you to shove pixels around
nearly as much.
So, speaking of noise... How did the E-1 and 6D compare? I'm going to
say, again, that either the 6D is highly overrated or the E-1 is
highly underrated. At base ISO (100) and similar exposure, the
corrected images are almost a dead-match to each other in regards to
noise, DR and color. Note, that I said "corrected images". This means
that I applied curves adjustments to get the histograms to match as
closely as possible. The E-1 did require significantly less adjustment
than the 6D. By the time the 6D was adjusted to match the E-1, any
low-noise goodness of the 6D was wiped out.
The 6D has 4x the surface area as the E-1, but the pixel-pitch is just
about the same. A multi-image stitch from the E-1 should be as good as
the 6D. Of course, the advantage is to the 6D in regards to the sensor
size and the ability to take OMZ lenses, as well as the jaw-dropping
high-iso performance. But at native ISOs, the E-1 and 6D are dead
matches once the curves are matched. More or less. There are
differences, of course, especially in color interpretation of
vegetation, (the three cameras wouldn't match leaf color of a tree in
the neighbor's yard at all). The 6D is naturally producing much
flatter images that need to be sent down the acid-trip lane, and worse
of all, the 6D has much more chroma noise in the shadows, but
lightroom whacks that easily.
That said, there is a bit of a twist to all this. Without a
comparative, I wouldn't process the 6D the way I did and would have
ended up with a different image.
I will do some scientific testing, but it was interesting to see how
the three cameras did in a direct head-to-head in a brief sunset
walkabout.
AG Schnozz
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