Kodak DCS 760 vs. D1 (not D1x) Resolution

Review Note by Uwe Steinmueller @Digital Outback Photo

Also photos by Bettina Steinmueller

Last Updated (06/15/2001)

Disclaimer: This does not compare the 760 to the D1x (which we did not have in our hands yet). Still for users of the D1 (as ourselves) it might be interesting to see whether the 760 (or possibly the D1x) is worth spending extra money.

Why would one need the resolution of the DCS 760? This resolution is needed for larger prints. Incidentally Bettina and I made similar photos of a barn near La Honda. So what we will show here is not scientific and precise but is hopefully shows the basic difference in resolution of both cameras.

Here are the two photos:

DCS 760 at about 35mm (AF-S 17-35mm f/2.8, ISO 125)

D1 at about 28mm (AF-S 28-70mm f/2.8, NEF, Bibble 2.99, ISO 200)

The strong difference in the sky color is not related to one of the cameras as we used for the 760 photo a gradient neutral gray filter (Lee 0.6 soft).

The question we had was how wood the photo look at 30x20". That is why we resampled both images to 30x20" at 314 DPI and sharpened both in the same way. Why 314DPI? We printed a letter sized crop on an Olympus P400 printer and it has that odd resolution. The difference in resolution is quite obvious looking at the prints. Here we will show just some crops of the upsampled photos.

760

Actually the D1 did not really perform that bad for such a big size but the 760 shows significant more resolution. As we said this was not a planned experiment but we wanted to share these observations with our readers.