Nikon D800 screen

sid-180

sid-180

sid-180

Associate
Joined
6 Nov 2009
Posts
551
Me and friend went out to photograph today and noticed we took the same image and his image just looked so much better with the same settings and equivalent lens I own the Nikon D800 and he has the Canon 5DIII.

Am I missing something or does the Nikon screen look washed out compared to the Canon screen.

Any suggestions welcomed.
 
I know you said his looked better, but being practical which was the more accurate? Personally I find much photography plagued by over saturation like someone's slipped some acid into the memory slots and many cameras are on a very colourful trip. The last thing I'd need is that starting right from the camera screen. But then I'm just a very new beginner with an old D90.

I guess it also depends on what settings he had, do you mean just the ISO, fstop and shutter speed were matched? Did you have the Active D-Lighting and Picture Control (or D800 equivalents) cranked up?

Did you check to see how the vibrancy of the images themselves differed on a monitor? It might be an idea to view the same image from the one camera on each screen rather than just the same scene shot on different cameras.

If the Nikon still turns out to be flat, I've no idea if it's possible but perhaps you could use a custom firmware to adjust the LCD display settings if the menu doesn't offer any help. Or perhaps the screen really is just that much inferior. I'd be interested to know, even though both are well out of my reach.
 
also when you say you had the same settings are you referring to iso, aperture etc.

If so is it possible he was using a different photo mode ie vivid or landscape etc.?

Some people think a more saturated image looks better, like when you go into a TV shop and they always have the contrast on max because it looks "nice colours".. I'd rather have a natural picture.

Only other thing I can think of is if the difference is only slight, the D800 has a plastic cover over the screen, shouldn't make much difference but depends if you are being picky.

Question is how did they look when you got them home!
 
Sorry guys I meant to say the image in the camera screen the canon just seem to have deeper colors, even the sky and clouds looked more realistic on the canon screen compared to the Nikon.
 
sid-180 said:
Sorry guys I meant to say the image in the camera screen the canon just seem to have deeper colors, even the sky and clouds looked more realistic on the canon screen compared to the Nikon.
Click to expand...

Yes, but if you had your camera set to take black and white pictures you wouldn't be thinking "Ermagerd, the screen on this camera only shows black and white, and his shows full colour!"

Likewise his settings other than just the obviously matched ones (like ISO etc) may have brought the colours out better, which showed on the screen. As Jase says, how did they both look on the monitor, identical? Or was his more vivid?

I get the feeling I could be completely misunderstanding this.
 
sid-180 said:
Me and friend went out to photograph today and noticed we took the same image and his image just looked so much better with the same settings and equivalent lens I own the Nikon D800 and he has the Canon 5DIII.

Am I missing something or does the Nikon screen look washed out compared to the Canon screen.

Any suggestions welcomed.
Click to expand...

The image displayed in review is an embedded jpeg image even when shot in RAW this jpeg will have all of the camera processing setting such as contrast, saturation, vibrancy, brightness, sharpness. Canon cameras by default set higher contrast, more sharpness and greater saturation at default settings. So even if you set things up as default you expect there to be differences and the canon image to look "better". For this reason I tend to bump the contrast and saturation even when shooting jpegs to get a better idea of my output image.

and then there is the whole screen calibration and setup. Again, nikon tends not to boost contrast and saturation of their LCD screens so even if you put the an identical image on both cameras you expect a different image to be seen.

No different to viewing an image on a calibrated monitor and an off the self LCD. You average LCD screen will be far brighter, have more contrast, will be warmer and will have a different colour balance to a corrected screen.
 
His image just looked a tad but better in terms of color and we did the image with the exact same settings. I think I may have had active d lighting turned off.
 
sid-180 said:
His image just looked a tad but better in terms of color and we did the image with the exact same settings. I think I may have had active d lighting turned off.
Click to expand...

As has been said, he could have boosted any contrast/saturation setting at will and even when both at default the canon will produce punchier jpegs - that is just a design decision. The screens may be different as ell, e.g. the glossy screen tend to give the appear of deeper blacks but the reflections are worse so monitors for graphics work and photo edition have matt screens.
 
D.P. said:
As has been said, he could have boosted any contrast/saturation setting at will and even when both at default the canon will produce punchier jpegs - that is just a design decision. The screens may be different as ell, e.g. the glossy screen tend to give the appear of deeper blacks but the reflections are worse so monitors for graphics work and photo edition have matt screens.
Click to expand...

Thats food for thought i will look into this more with him.
 
The Canon 5D Mark III screen is a higher resolution screen than the Nikon D800, so that might have something to do with it.

Canon 5D MKIII is 1,040,000, whilst the D800 is 921,000.

The D800 screen has also been reported to have a slight green cast in certain situations.

That said, it is likely that the in Camera processing also has a bearing on it.
 
abbotsmike said:
Slightly off topic, but why are camera screens described in total number of pixels, rather than height*width resolution, like every other screen on the planet?!
Click to expand...

They're given in dots, not pixels. A 720*480 screen is 345,600 pixels, but there are three dots (1 R, 1 G, 1 B) per pixel and it's described as 1040k dot, the old 320*240 screens were 76,800 pixels or 230k dot. As for why, not sure, I guess it might be so people didn't confuse the screen resolution with the image resolution?

If you're shooting in Raw and he's shooting in Raw+jpeg there will be processing on his jpeg preview and not on yours. Equally the screens have different settings you may well just have the Canon screen turned up brighter
 
Ksanti said:
They're given in dots, not pixels. A 720*480 screen is 345,600 pixels, but there are three dots (1 R, 1 G, 1 B) per pixel and it's described as 1040k dot, the old 320*240 screens were 76,800 pixels or 230k dot. As for why, not sure, I guess it might be so people didn't confuse the screen resolution with the image resolution?
Click to expand...

Ah OK, cheers for the explanation, I'm currently looking to get into photography 'proper' so still finding my feet with numbers and specs etc.
 
Ksanti said:
They're given in dots, not pixels. A 720*480 screen is 345,600 pixels, but there are three dots (1 R, 1 G, 1 B) per pixel and it's described as 1040k dot, the old 320*240 screens were 76,800 pixels or 230k dot. As for why, not sure, I guess it might be so people didn't confuse the screen resolution with the image resolution?

If you're shooting in Raw and he's shooting in Raw+jpeg there will be processing on his jpeg preview and not on yours. Equally the screens have different settings you may well just have the Canon screen turned up brighter
Click to expand...

There will be processing on the jpeg preview using he same jpeg options, which is why for accurate histograms you need to be careful of your setings and use the UniWB trick.

The difference could simply be that the OP's friend has a more vibrant jpeg settings while the OP has a more neutral/default setting.
 
Andy90 said:
The Canon 5D Mark III screen is a higher resolution screen than the Nikon D800, so that might have something to do with it.

Canon 5D MKIII is 1,040,000, whilst the D800 is 921,000.

The D800 screen has also been reported to have a slight green cast in certain situations.

That said, it is likely that the in Camera processing also has a bearing on it.
Click to expand...

The difference ins resolution is around 3.5% linear increase which is not visible
 
What do you mean by not visible?

Actually forget about an explaination, they're preview screens and the Canon has more pixels, not exactly a massive selling point but its there nevertheless. Proof of the pudding is always in the resultant image irrespective of the Camera.
 
Last edited:
Andy90 said:
What do you mean by not visible?

Actually forget about an explaination, they're preview screens and the Canon has more pixels, not exactly a massive selling point but its there nevertheless. Proof of the pudding is always in the resultant image irrespective of the Camera.
Click to expand...

Invisible because humans cannot perceive spatial resolution differences of less than ~10% linear resolution. Plenty of physiometric research into this which is useful for designing things like video compression, similar to human colour perception etc. Put 2 identical technology screens side by side but where one has 5-7% more linear resolution and a majority of average people couldn't say which one was higher resolution.

The 5dmk3 sensor might well be better than the d800's but it has nothing to do with resolution.
 
Last edited:
D.P. said:
Invisible because humans cannot perceive spatial resolution differences of less than ~10% linear resolution. Plenty of physiometric research into this which is useful for designing things like video compression, similar to human colour perception etc. Put 2 identical technology screens side by side but where one has 5-7% more linear resolution and a majority of average people couldn't say which one was higher resolution.

The 5dmk3 sensor might well be better than the d800's but it has nothing to do with resolution.
Click to expand...

Except that it's more than the 3.5% figure you suggested because the reason Canon's moved to a 3:2 format is so that stills fill the entire screen whereas on the 640*480 Nikon screens there is a black bar. I still doubt that the resolution is what's causing any differences.

Sometimes it's easy to forget the actual context when you want to apply concepts but the basic stuff matters too e.g. is the whole screen being used.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom