Nikon D700 versus Canon 5d

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Posted by Patrick on Aug 2, 2008 in Cameras

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via the forums (so helpful, the forums are)

Said Karlsson has a helpful, though not scientific by any means, write up about the Nikon D700. Karlsson is a 5D shooter, so there’s some interesting insight to some of the advantages of the D700 over the 5D (or not).

Some highlights for Karlsson:

The screen on the D700 is nothing short of lovely. Razor sharp, compared to the 5D it’s actually usable. It’s easy to see if a photo is good or bad by using the screen.
- Autofocus is better on the D700. More focus points and the joystick on the back makes choosing the point easy and quick. The auto selection mode also works much better, shooting from the hip is much easier with the D700 than the 5D.
- Viewfinder blackout and serial shooting is faster with the 700D. 5fps vs 3fps, quite nice, but not in any way a dealbreaker for me
- Exposure is better on the D700. Many of my shots with the 5D turns out overexposed, im not sure if that’s because of me, my lenses or the camera, but the D700 seems far far far far far far far more reliable in this regard (this is a big thing!!!).

Karlsson does mention something that I had forgotten a couple of posts ago though:

Lightroom also has the best tools for recovering details in blown highlights out of the software i’ve used. The big problem with Lightroom however, is that it uses Adobes Camera Raw-algorithm that renders skin tones in a ugly way. People gets a disguisting orange tint that just looks awful. This occurs in most lighting conditions, and even if it’s possible to somewhat correct this by adjusting the white balance and in post processing, I find it really hard to get satisfying results. My raw converter of choice, Capture One 4, gives by far better results straight without any tweaking what so ever, unfortunately it doesn’t support the D700 yet. Nikons own software, Capture NX 2, gives good results but is so slow i wouldn’t even consider using it even if it was free.

I’ve downloaded the beta profiles, and mentioned that I didn’t see a big difference in Lightroom 2 vs. Capture, but that isn’t true of skin tones. To my eye, I agree whole heartedly that Lightroom is inferior (in this regard), and I’ve seen quite a bit of talk of this on various forums and comments. But as Karlsson says, Capture is SOOO slow that I rarely use it, which is too bad, because I like it otherwise (big fan of the control points and NIK in general). So yes if you’ve noticed Lightroom looks different than on camera, it’s not just you.

By the way, in addition to the nice hands on account of the D700, Karlsson has some very nice photos too! All of it you can get here.

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