Wednesday, October 04, 2006
Digital SLR Best Skin Tone Quality Contest Shootout
Do you take a lot of portrait photography? How about weddings or parties? Then you know how important well balanced skin tones are to your photos. Sure, you can take the image into Photoshop and adjust it but why go to the hassle because your equipment let you down?
The folks at shootsmarter have taken the bull by the horns and taken a crop of professional digital slr’s, run them through a test shoot, printed the results and given them a score.
The professional DSLR cameras tested were:
With 2 or 3 bodies each (except for the Canon 1D’s where only 1 each were available but they were rather new and in excellent condition) they adjusted for exposure compensation before the shoot.
“The files were all different sizes of course, but they were all printed to 12x18 size at the default 300 PPI resolution of the Frontier, and cropped by the Frontier software to eliminate the letter ID above the models’ head in each frame. We also did some minor cropping to the full frame sensor camera files to make the headsize on the print as similar as possible. This means the files were “rezzed up” internally by the Frontier using the latest version of Fuji’s premium PIC Pro software as the file is printed.”
“After the shoot the files were printed on a high end Frontier printer to print 12x18 prints onto Fujifilm’s premium Crystal Archive Professional Type P paper which is the standard of the pro labs in the USA.”
The results after 71 scorecards were tallied was somewhat of a surprise. The Canon EOS 5D full frame camera beat out all comers. At the bottom was the much pricier Canon EOS 1Ds II. Of course this is a very limited test and only grades “skin tone” quality and does not take into account all the other attributes of these fine cameras.
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