Teeeeejirrrrr

Well, this is the long-delayed next part of my ongoing comparison between the Canon 1D Mark III and the Canon SX110. For those of you wondering why in the hell I am even trying to compare one of Canon’s premier digital SLR cameras versus one of their budget point-and-shooters, check out this posting in which I try to explain some of the insanity.

Can you tell the difference between output from the two cameras? (Comparison gallery is posted after the ‘read more’ button)

Without further ado, here are some comparison shots. The answers as to which camera took what is underneath the gallery view.

Answers are printed here… (highlight text below to read)

Shots named comparo_11 to comparo_14 were taken with the SX110. Shots named comparo_15 to comparo_18 were taken with the 1D Mark III.

Testing Methodology (Or utter lack of)

The 1D Mark III was using the EF 80mm f1.2L prime lens, stopped down to f/8. The reason I used this lens was completely arbitrary, but mainly for the fact that I plan on doing some night shooting in a later comparison and wanted to keep the lens usage consistent.

Obviously, the 80mm f1.2 rules the night, and there are things that it can do at f/1.2 that few other lenses can match- but for future night testing it will be stopped down to f/8 as well in an effort to make this a fair fight. Plus with such razor thin depth of field at f/1.2 it would be really easy to tell which lens shot what.

The SX110 was adjusted to use as close of a field of view as possible. There’s a bit of slack in this regard because the zoom is not entirely forthcoming as to what focal length it is at.

The resulting images are screen captures which were saved to PNG files to minimize lossiness on output from the SX110, and eliminate it altogether for the 1D Mark III. The SX110 images were taken right out of the camera under default settings. The 1D Mark III images were taken from screenshots of Digital Photo Professional (Canon’s RAW processor). In addition, they were color and contrast corrected to meet the SX110’s settings.

Of course there is a reasonable amount of sloppiness in these tests. I did not use a tripod, this was some real-world shooting with an emphasis on daylight shots with plenty of available light.

I’m sure someone will have something to say about a lack of lab conditions for these tests, but that’s one of the major points as to why I am doing these tests. Can you tell the difference?