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.
http://forum.getdpi.com/forum/images/smilies/wtf.gif
Friday October 14 2011
When we received the IQ 180 Digital Back from Phase One, we expected a lot from this huge 80 MPixels sensor. And, indeed, the sensor is the best we ever tested with an overall score of 91: the best score ever and the first one over 90 points on DxOMark scale! Let’s check the details.
As usual with Phase One sensors, we were particularly impressed by its Color Depth with a portrait score of 26.5, also the best Color Depth ever measured on DxOMark.
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).
Thanks to its specific Sensor Plus mode, the IQ 180 scores pretty good in low-light condition with a 966 ISO score, but it remains far from the best cameras like the Nikon D3s with a 3253 ISO low-light score.
So, as the IQ180 will mainly be used in a studio with full control of the lighting conditions, the low light ISO weakness shouldn’t be an issue. And, the awesome color depth and dynamic range should give full satisfaction to the most demanding photographers.
The IQ 180 vs other Phase One cameras:
In this comparison with its predecessors the Phase One P65+ and Phase One P45+, we can see that the IQ 180 model improves every aspect except Low-Light ISO Score. This can be explained by the fact that the sensor surface didn’t change.
Looking at the non normalized results, it is still a bit surprising that we did not see any specific improvement of the Dynamic Range.
Phase one IQ180 vs the best Full Frame and APS-C:
In this comparison of the Phase One IQ 180 vs Nikon D3x and Canon EOS 1Ds Mark III or with the APS-C Nikon D7000 and Pentax K5, we clearly see the superiority of the IQ 180 in term of Color Depth, its good Dynamic Range and its relatively poor Low Light ISO performance. But as we said, these strength and weaknesses are very well balanced for a studio camera.
Overall this is quite an achievement for Phase One managed to increase the DxOMark score of the IQ 180 compared to the P65 Plus while adding 20 MPixels within the same sensor surface.
It is still interesting to note that theoretically, the Phase One IQ180 could score much better with such a huge sensor surface, if the pixel quality would be closer to the quality of the best APS-C (or full frame) sensor’s pixel.