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Nikon D7100 VS Canon 7D - Dynamic Range Test

vs16Take a look at these dynamic range tests between the Nikon D7100 and Canon 7D. We take both of these cameras into a tough situation, give them identical settings, and see what they can do:

vs16

This is what happens when trying to photograph during sunset. You can either expose for the ground or subject while blowing out the sky, or expose for the sky and turn your subject into a silhouette. But fortunately, when shooting RAW, there is enough information stored in the shadows and highlights to bring back this lost information during post production. Unfortunately, this often results in additional grain and banding. Nikon seems to have figured out a method of dealing with this in their sensor design with some cameras like the D800 & D600, however, let's see how Nikon does with their new Nikon D7100 against the Canon 7D.

Here is the test, both cameras were set to the same kelvin white balance, same exact settings, and same focal lengths. This produced the following images.

Nikon D7100
D71_0067original
Canon 7D
IMG_0736original
Taking both of these RAW files, converting them to Tif (Adobe RAW has not been updated for Nikon RAW files), and boosting the shadows 100% while lowering the highlights 100% gave these results:
Nikon D7100 - Shadows +100% Highlights -100%
D71_0067Edit
Canon 7D - Shadows +100% Highlights -100%
IMG_0736Edit
And here are the 100% crops of those images to compare:
Nikon D7100 - 100% Crop
D71_0067
Canon 7D - Shadows +100% Highlights -100%
IMG_0736

It is clear to see that the Canon exhibits banding in the image and is just about unusable. The Nikon file, while still not great is fairly easy to fix in post and still has decent looking shadows. 

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