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PERFORMANCE: EXPOSURE LATITUDE

-3EV

-2EV

-1EV

0

+1EV

+2EV

To assess exposure latitude, a variety of scenes were exposure bracketed in 1EV steps up to +/-4EV– the two extreme exposures are not shown here. This bracket (of Dorset's Durdle Door) started at 1/500sec at f/4 at ISO 100. The Raws were exposure corrected in Adobe Lightroom. The D780’s Raws have very good exposure latitude. If youmanage to underexpose by -4EV, you deserve all you get, but the D780’s Raws

corrected very, very well. I expected to see serious noise – there was some, but it was well controlled – in the exposure-corrected shadows and a significant

impact on detail and colour saturation, but no, I got very decent

images that stood direct comparison, even with the correctly exposed shots. By definition, the less severely underexposed Raws looked very good, correcting nicely and with no noise or artefacts, so no issues at all with underexposure.

With overexposed Raws, the +2EV shots consistently corrected well, giving almost identical results to the correctly exposed shots. Overexposing by 3EV could still give acceptable results when there was no bright sky in shot. If there was sky

in shot, it would have a grey, veiled look typical of severe overexposure. In summary, the D780’s underexposure

for a faster effective ISO if you needed to and not sacrifice image quality too much. Overexposure is more limited to this sort of exposure abuse, but +2EVRaws are still very recoverable. A very good overall showing, though.

+3EV

performance was impressive, even

exceptional, so you could deliberately underexpose

There is no AF point joystick, so you have to use the four-way controller or D-pad. It works fine in practice, but it could be bigger and a focus lever would be better still. In viewfinder photography, the area covered by the 51 AF zones covers around one third of central area, which is limited compared with the camera’s live view AF, which covers much more of the full-frame format, with 273 AF points with touch focus/shooting and face and eye detect. The D780 is the first Nikon DSLR with on-sensor phase-detect AF, but having two systems with different characteristics takes getting used to. Live view AF was generally very good, sensitive and accurate, but it’s not infallible. For example, on several occasions I was shooting with the camera at ground level and using touch AF, but found the focusing slightly off when I double-checked using the focus magnifier option and I manually tweaked the focus. Sensitivity and responsiveness in both AF modes in low light was generally very good. I shoot mostly matrix metering mode in aperture-priority and manual

exposure modes, and I have to say that exposures were generally very consistent and accurate. During my time with the D780, I made around 2500 exposures in a wide variety of lighting scenarios. This included a trip to Iceland (dealing with black sand, blue ice and snow), the high winds of Storm Dennis and on a calm, sunny weekend on the Dorset coast. There’s a gallery of Iceland shots taken on the Nikon D780 on the Photography News website. I was shooting JPEGs and 14-bit Raws processed through Lightroom and Nikon Capture NX-D. Exposures were generally accurate and consistent, faltering on some tricky sunlit Icelandic snow scenes, but I think any camera would have had the same issues. In such situations, the camera erred on the side of underexposure, which I find preferable and meant that highlights retained detail. The potential downside of this is if shadows need a serious uplift in processing, there’s the risk of more noise present in these tones – but that is better than burnt-out highlights, which are often beyond recovery. Black sand

THE QUALITY OF THE VIDEO FOOTAGE AND STILL SHOTS WAS IMPRESSIVE, THOUGH, WITH EXCELLENT SHARPNESS

Issue 75 | Photography News 73

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