This view of the old Easthampton Town Hall from the top of Mt. Tom is my favorite test location. The building is about 2.5 miles from the mountain site where photographed using the Nikkor 300mm F4 AF lens with Kenko Pro 300 2X telextender. Details in the roof shingles, brickwork, and lobby area help in judging resolution. The cameras used were the D1H, D50, D1X, and D300 in order of increasing resolution.

All of the cameras wee set as identically as possible: Single frame; single focus point; sunny WB; iso200; F8; center-point metering; normal or centered contrast and in-camera sharpening; color set adobe or neutra; (and later the D50 and D1X and D1H were changed to neutral in Picture Controls); contrast optimized to end points of histogram; sharpening set at 10-5-1 initially. Auto-iso was off; Active D was off. Delayed shutter was used on all but the D300. The D300 used mirror-up with automatic 30 sec delay. The focus point was on the dark shadow to the left of the collumn, where it meets the brick facade of the building, just below the roofline.

Later in PP the D1X and D1H were boosted by .7EV, while the D300 was decreased by .3EV. This reflected the descrepancy in metering calibration/dynamic range curve for the respective cameras. And finally, sharpness was poor enough for the high-res D300 and D1X cameras that I ended up increasing the unsharp mask from 10-5-0 (adequate for the D50 and D1H) to 25/15/3 and 35/15/3 respectively, in order that picture quality at 300ppi 8x10 picture size be optimized. It is quite possible that these high-res files exceeded the resolution threshold of the 300mm F4 AF / Kenko Pro 300 2X telextender combination in use, especially as there was an at-times gusty breeze blowing.

Three shots were taken by each camera using the lens combination, mounted on a Manfrotto tripod and ballhead. The sharpest representative from each was used for the comparison.

After PP'ng, All small shots were re-rez'd to 300ppi, 8x10 resolution using NX2's resolution conversion tool. All large shots were re-rez'd to 300pp, 13x19 resolution. Thus the small photos represent practical amateur photo use; the large size more professional printing size, and importantly, much closer to pixel-level sharpness requirements.

The photos are left-to-right ranked in order of resolution (2.7mp D1H, 6.0mp D50, 6.0mp D1X, 10.0mp D1X, 12.3mp D300). One can conclude that any of these are capable of acceptable resolution for 8x10 printing; but one can also conclude that the larger photostite, smaller pixel D1H and D50 actually perform better as a practical matter when upsized for large-size printing, due to their resistance to blurring and pixel-smearing.