Sensor Wars 2: EOS R vs Sony vs Fuji: Dynamic Range | 4K

Name: Sensor Wars 2: EOS R vs Sony vs Fuji: Dynamic Range | 4K | Open Video
Uploaded: 2023-07-24T18:01:33+00:00
Duration: 24 min 14 s

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Hi, I'm Dustin Abbott and I'm back to give you another episode in the sensor wars series
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Now on our first episode, we took a look at how some of the new cameras on the market like the
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Fuji X-T3, the Canon EOS R, how they compare with some of the existing options on the market like
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5D Mark IV, and then I also threw in the Sony a7R III and a6500, how they compare when it comes to
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their performance at high ISO values. Now, in today's episode, we're going to take a look at
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dynamic range. Now, I do recognize, before I jump into this and before all of you ask
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yes, the Sony a7 III would be a great point of comparison. Unfortunately, I don't have one on
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hand. I do have the a7R Mark III on hand and I have compared the a7R III and the a7 III before
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And so while I do believe the a7 III was a little better at high ISO values, when it comes to dynamic
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range, they were roughly similar. And so the a7R III is a pretty good stand in when it comes to that
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And by the way, while I don't have any Nikons on hand and I don't really review Nikon, I did review
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the Nikon D850 and found that it performs fairly close to the Sonys when it comes to dynamic range
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as well. Now dynamic range, as we're going to see in these tests, I mostly focus on it when it comes
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to the aspects which I consider the practical ones. And that is how that the cameras do when
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you're recovering either shadows or highlights in situations where one or the other is, in the case
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of shadows, they are underexposed or in the highlights they're overexposed. Now that's not
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just for when you make a mistake. And by the way, mistakes do happen. You know, flashes don't fire
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right. A setting gets left unchecked or you have to shoot on the fly and you need to, you don't have
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a chance to really tweak those settings. These things do happen. And so I do recognize that
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sometimes you are making up for having missed exposure for one reason or another. But beyond
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that, there are just a lot of real world situations where you need some latitude in processing a final
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image because we don't get to control every bit of light. And the byproduct of that is that
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there's something that has to give. Maybe you don't expose properly for a sky and you need to
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try to recover that sky in a landscape image or in a portrait shot. Maybe there are some hot spots
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on a person's face where the flash or the lighting has kind of hit it unevenly. And you want to try
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to tweak that a little bit. Maybe it's opening up shadows. A lot of times I'm shooting to where a
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forest is in the scene, but I've learned from experience that I can recover shadows quite well
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with modern cameras. And so I'll underexpose the forest a little bit to give me maybe a little bit
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more to play with in the sky. And of course, then if you have good dynamic range, you can open up
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those shadows and reveal the details that were hidden by underexposure in the forest, for example
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while not introducing a lot of noise or, you know, either in terms of kind of roughness or in color
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And so we're going to see how these cameras compare when it comes to that. And we're going to start by looking at base ISO
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Let's jump in and let's take a look. All right. And this first comparison that we're going to do across all these cameras is we're going
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to be looking at the shadow recovery portion of the dynamic range, and this will be at
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base ISO. And so one thing to note is that all of these cameras do not share a base ISO
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And so what we're going to do is just standardize the test. And so that will put some sensors at, you know, a quote unquote advantage or disadvantage on that, you know, immediate test
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But across the board, it will all equal out because where some are advantaged, others will, they'll be disadvantaged on another test
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And so anyway, it's hard to do an apples to apples comparison with oranges and apples
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So we're just going to do our best here. So looking at this, I wanted to show you just how much shadow recovery we're doing
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So this is on the A7R Mark III, and so you can see that the base image itself is extremely dark
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I mean, you can barely make out what's there. This is the recovered image where I have added four stops of exposure in post back into it
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So we'll see how this result compares with that of others. So on the left, we have the A7R Mark III
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On the right, we have the EOS R. And so a few things that we're going to note here, obviously
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I mean, they handle white balance a little bit differently, as you can see, and color
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which we've talked about before, a little bit differently. We've also noted that there is a
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nice amount of sensitivity to the EOS R, and so it does give a, like in this area here, it delivers
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a better, superior contrast to that of what the 5D Mark IV did with identical settings
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What we can also see, however, is that the A7R Mark III does an even better job of retaining a neutrality
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You can see there's a little bit of color banding in there, and while I think the textures look pretty good overall
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they're a little bit better in the A7R Mark III. Likewise, if you look inside the classic SLR here, what you can see is that they've both basically recovered an equal amount of information
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but you can see there's more of a noise cost and a little bit of discoloration in there
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that the A7R Mark III does not have. Likewise, if we go up into the dark area here, you can see some
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banding and discoloration from the EOS R, which we're not seeing on the A7R Mark III
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On a positive note, however, both of them have retained great amounts of detail in these
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recovered textures, everything looks fairly clean. In terms of actual, just kind of noise everywhere
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you can see a bit more of it here with the EOS R It cleaner on the A7R Mark III and you can see that there are some better textures that have been recovered A little bit cleaner you know overall
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but at the same time, both cameras have done a useful job. But in this case, the A7R Mark III
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is our winner. So what happens if we stack the A7R Mark III up against the Fuji? Now
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of course, the Fuji, as I noted, it does have a different base ISO. And so what we're seeing is
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we're getting a little bit a brighter image from the Fuji because of the fact that it is
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it's working at a higher base ISO to begin with. And so that gives it a bit of advantage here. It
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will give it a bit of a disadvantage in the highlight recovery end. But what we can see
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is that it's doing a really really fantastic job and for shadow recovery
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here I'm pretty impressed by the amount of detail that's being produced on the
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sensor and how clean the interior is nice and bright you can see there's
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there's great kind of a dynamic range and caught well a contrast really a
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micro contrast on that just a lot of really detailed information and what we
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can see is that while the noise is more visible in terms of the actual pattern noise, it's done
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a pretty good job of not going towards basic discoloration or kind of off-colored. And so we
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can also see it's a little bit better, I would say, in this area than what the ESR was. And you
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can see that it's quite competitive with the Sony when it comes to this information here. And I will
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note that it does it while retaining what I would consider to be a little more neutral white balance
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than what the A Sovereign R Mark III does. And so really a fairly strong performance here by the
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Fuji. Let's see how these compare. We'll compare the Fuji now with another APS-C body. So in this
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case, we're putting the Fuji X-T3 up against the Sony A6500. And so another very, very, very good
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APS-C sensor. And so looking at both of these at a pixel level, what we can see is that both
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them actually deliver great amounts of detail and information. I really like that. I do believe that
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there is a little bit of a different patterned noise showing up there on the A6500 that I'm not
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seeing on the X-T3. And inside here, both of them delivering quite a clean result. Let's look up
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into this shadow area. What we're seeing is with the A6500, there's some kind of striations that
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are going through there. And while there is some, you know, kind of rough pattern noise
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in the defocused or in, you know, dark area, what we're seeing is, is that the A6500 is introducing
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a little bit more of kind of color artifacts in that instead. Looking also in this area here
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they are roughly equal to my eye. And in terms of the detail recovered here, I think there's a
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little bit of noise on the A6500 in the black area that doesn't show up to the same degree on
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the X-T3. And so some pros and cons, but I would say that in some areas we're getting a cleaner
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result out of the Fuji, at least in shadow recovery. Now, in our next test, we're looking
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at highlight recovery. And so we've gone to the opposite extreme. In this case, we have a three
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stop overexposure. And so you can see in this case in post on the A7R Mark III, I've dropped exposure
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down by three stops. And so that gives you the baseline for what we are comparing here
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So when we compare the EOS R, once again, we see that the tuning of sensitivity on this
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is a little bit different. In some ways, it almost operates like it is at a little bit of
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a different base ISO than either the 5D Mark IV or in this case the A7R Mark III. And so it clearly
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is delivering a brighter image with equal settings here. But we're here to look at some other things
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as well. You know, kind of our highlights. So before we were looking at the shadow information
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that's not our problem now. Now we're looking at the opposite extreme. And so looking at areas like
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this. And so you can see that the A7R Mark III has retained more of that texture information that is
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blown out. Likewise, along these edges here. That's the kind of thing we're looking at here
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You can see, you know, more of the texture of the actual, this game cover here. And so some of that
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has been lost from the A, or excuse me, the EOS R that has been retained in the A7R Mark III
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Likewise here, here's another hotspot that you can see has been handled much better on the A7R
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Mark III. And so, I mean, as a plus, we're definitely getting a nicely bright image off
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the EOS R. But in terms of the highlight recovery, there's definitely an advantage for the A7R Mark III
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So now we compare the Fuji with the A7R Mark III. And here is where the Fuji's advantage at the base
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ISO actually works against it coming here in that it technically will have a little less sensitivity
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down at this level. And you can see that it definitely is more overexposed in this area to
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begin with. However, I feel like it's done a reasonably good job of recovery, at least while
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it didn't get all the information back, it's managed to present it in a kind of a somewhat
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realistic looking fashion. It doesn't look like really fake or the transitions look halfway decent
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So I don't mind what I'm seeing there. We definitely have lost a little bit of extra information around this cue that we had not lost on the A7R Mark III Looking over here at our hotspot you can see that there definitely some information that
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lost there that has been retained on the A7R Mark III, and so that's the cost of the
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higher base ISO. What I will say, however, as I noted, is that I do think that the transitions
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to the hotspots are a little more natural looking than what they were on the EOS R
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and I'll show you what I mean. So here's showing you what I'm talking about. On the EOS R, what I'm
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feeling like is that there is a bit of some weird kind of coloration that comes around these hotspots
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that makes this look like a more recovered image than what that is, and that that's just a little
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bit of a smoother type transition. And so I do think that I like the way that the hotspots are
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handled a little bit better here, a little bit more naturally. And you can see here that on the EOS R
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that it's just a little more unnatural in terms of some of the kind of the brighter colors that
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are around the edges of the hotspots. Look at this versus this, for example. This looks more natural
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more believable than what some of that does. So let's compare the a6500 and the X-T3 here
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In this actual comparison, the a6500, it had a lost advantage on the shadow recovery end
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and here it should have a little bit of an advantage because of the base ISO, and this is
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where the trade-off comes into play. And what we can see is that in terms of this particular hotspot
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there's a little better detail kind of delineation around that H for the Honeywell logo that is there
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Likewise here it's just retained a little bit more of the contrast leading up to that
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and so that's a plus there. Let's look around that Q and yes we can see there's a little bit
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more information that's preserved there on the A6500 and looking over on this side we can
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definitely see it's done a better job with the highlight holding the highlights when it comes to
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that compared to the X-T3 and so in terms of the high end of a highlight recovery it's pretty obvious
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that the two Sony sensors have the advantage when it comes to that. Now for today's study I also
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wanted to take a look at what happens if you have to bump up the ISO into higher values. You know in
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a perfect world, we could always shoot at base ISO on our cameras and get the absolute cleanest
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most pristine image quality. But, you know, we don't shoot in a perfect world. We shoot in a
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world that's full of changes and different lighting conditions. And so I wanted to see if what we
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observed at base ISO remains true if we jump up to ISO 6400. I won't push things quite as far
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Instead of four stops, we'll do three stops. But let's take a look and see how these cameras compare
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with that kind of recovery at ISO 6400. Okay, we're also going to test how these cameras do
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when you push them near their limits at higher ISO settings. And just to kind of see how, you know
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obviously in the perfect world, you'd always get to shoot at ISO 100 and get the best of dynamic range
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But what happens if you start to creep up? In this case, we're going to push it just to a little bit of a higher extreme
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so we can see how these sensors react. And so we've got a three-stop overexposure and then a three-stop underexposure we're going to look at
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And so this shows you a before and after with the A7R Mark III. And so we're going to look at how well with these overexposures we're able to preserve those highlights
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which would mean things like sky or some skin tones maybe if things were overdone at more extremes
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So if we compare the A7R Mark III to the EOS R
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and once again, this is three stops have been added to both of these images in post
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We can see looking at them globally, they didn't look too bad. Looking at these highlight areas here, hot spots we previously identified
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once again, we see that even at higher ISO settings, the A7R III sensor is a little bit better at recovering those highlights
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part of its dynamic range ability, and likewise, and here there's just a little bit more of the texture information that's been preserved
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But at the same time, I don't think that hotspots look too bad here on the EOS R
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and I don't think it is far behind. And so in some ways, I would say that as we have moved up in ISO
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that that gap has closed a little bit between these two, and I don't find the differences as pronounced as I did at base ISO
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And how about our two APS-C sensors? What's interesting here is that the Fuji shows a higher base ISO, and however, what we're finding here is that although exposure value-wise, the A6500, although it says it has a base ISO 100, it's actually kind of metering in a similar way, which is closer to that of the Fuji than it is to, say, the A7R Mark III
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But anyway, we at least have an apples-to-apples comparison here. What I'm finding is that, once again, of course, Sony's sensor does really good in this metric
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Very good dynamic range. However, the X-T3 is pretty close there, I would say
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And as far as preserving those highlights, I think that it's done a pretty fantastic job here
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And both of them are delivering a pretty nice clean, you can still see with the X-T3 some of those textures that are showing up
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and so really a pretty amazing job for high ISO and bringing that down and as you can see
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at a pretty low amount of noise penalty there and a pretty good preservation of highlights
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Now in our final test here we going to look at the other end of the spectrum and recovering shadows at higher ISO settings Now what interesting is that as we go through these tests I think you see what I
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about to say is true that at base ISO I would typically encourage just about anyone if you're
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going to bias in any direction bias towards under exposure as cameras tend to be better at recovering
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shadows than they are highlights. What we're going to find in this particular test however is that I
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I think the opposite may be true here at higher ISOs. And so I think you can see even looking at a global level
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that adding three stops of exposure back in here has brought in some visible noise
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some kind of discoloration, that we just didn't see that kind of loss
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going the other direction with highlights. What we can see once again is that overall
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I think that what we're going to find is that the noise recovery is a little bit higher
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on the EOS R, and we'll take a look at that in just a second. In terms of the actual color banding
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they are more similar than different. So in some ways, the gap isn't quite as extreme
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as what it is at base ISO with these cameras. What we can see looking at them at a pixel level
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is that in the highly recovered area, for example, inside here, we can see that in some ways
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A7R Mark III is actually worse in that the pattern, the noise is kind of more varied
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but there's some very bright areas, whereas it's a little bit more like film grain with the EOS R
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there. And so, you know, there is some superior contrast, I think, with the A7R Mark III
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but in a lot of ways, I think that our difference is, you know, kind of the difference between these
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two sensors is certainly less pronounced when we're looking at this higher ISO. So finally with
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our APS-C sensors and so once again we've done the same thing here you'll see because of that
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difference in metering slash base ISO that our upper limit speed is again it's one third stop
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higher just to accommodate for that but taking a look here at you know kind of the internal noise
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level. One thing I will note is that on the a6500 you can see that there is we've kind of pushed
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towards a kind of a green noise pattern there whereas while the the noise is coarse on the
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Fuji it also has stayed more neutral when it comes to the color also the contrast is a little
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superior on the Fuji and so as far as the amount of noise and the roughness I would say that
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the X-T3 is actually a hair worse, but I would actually prefer the image in some ways to that
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of the A6500 because I think that colors have stayed a little bit more accurate, even though
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the noise pattern is a little bit rougher comparing the two. So just to give you an idea of how these
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two compare the X-T3, you know, kind of two brand new cameras, X-T3 with the EOS R. So one is APS-C
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one is full frame and so they do react a little bit differently. I mean the the noise is definitely
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rougher on the X-T3 compared to the the EOS R which has a little bit more of a smooth slash
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consistent pattern to it but we can also see that there is more basic contrast there from the
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X-T3. Of course you can always dial in extra contrast to this image here and so I'm not going
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to tell you which one you should see as being better because really it's up to you. But they
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do behave a little bit differently and part of that is the difference between a full frame and
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a how be it a very good but still an APS-C type sensor. And so as you can see at the end of the
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day I do think continue to believe that the Sony sensors provide the best dynamic range with you
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know some of Nikon's better ones being very very close there as well. They're doing a really
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fantastic job of giving you a lot of latitude for playing with either highlights or shadows
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and in a real world sense I have found that there is a difference between the 5D Mark IV
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and now the EOS R compared to the Sony bodies that I've shot with. That's one area where I think that
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Sony does have a tangible difference. You know it's not huge but it does make a difference and
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I mostly find it in that I have a little bit more headroom to pull down skies and balance them out
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with the Sony sensors than I do with the 5D Mark IV. And as we also saw, the X-T3 is really doing
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a pretty fantastic job as well. And both the a6500 and the X-T3, there's some give and take there
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but for being APS-C sensors, they show really how capable a good APS-C sensor has become at this
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point. Now when it comes to the EOS R, I think that it is competitive. I don't think it's as good
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when it comes to dynamic range. It's not way behind, but it is behind by a little bit. But
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at the end of the day, you can take some consolation if your camera didn't win this
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competition today. Let me just put it this way. At this stage, if you can't get good images out of
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any of these modern cameras, it's not the camera's fault. I'm Dustin Abbott, and if you'll look in
23:40
the description down below. You can find links to both places to purchase these cameras, also some
23:46
image galleries if you'd like to take a look at what I'm doing with them right now. And you can
23:51
also, of course, follow me down through those linkage. You can sign up for my newsletter
23:55
become a patron, follow me on social media. And of course, if you haven't already
23:59
please click that subscribe button right here on YouTube. Thanks for watching. Have a great day

Sensor Wars 2: EOS R vs Sony vs Fuji: Dynamic Range | 4K

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Sensor Wars 2: EOS R vs Sony vs Fuji: Dynamic Range | 4K

Dustin Abbott