ondebanks
Member
There is a very simple explanation for that: readout noise. At the frame rates demanded by photographers, none of the CCDs in MFDBs has readout noise remotely as low as the best CMOS sensors in APS-C or FF-DSLRs. Readout noise is the denominator in the dynamic range equation, so to significantly boost the DR, you "only" have to drop the readout noise (easier said than done!).I'll probably get a spanking for asking this, but what do you make of the following DXO review of the IQ180? Either I'm not understanding something or I was just uninformed, but I thought the IQ180 had the highest DR of any camera, yet below they say it is less than some APS-C cameras.
"In term of dynamic range, the IQ180 also reaches the very high score 13.6 Evs, but still doesn’t beat the best APS-C sensors, like the Pentax K5 (14.1 Evs) or the Nikon D7000 (13.9 Evs)."
Let me ask folks here: Would you be happy the menu option of with a 5 sec/frame (not 5 frame/sec!) readout time on your MFDB? In many circumstances, I would, because clocking out the pixels at a slower frequency reduces readout noise. A 50% reduction might be the most one could hope for, and the resulting noise would still be around 3-4 times worse than the CMOS cameras, but it's a good start! That would improve both DR and high ISO performance.
Ray