Interesting Article on the State of Sensor Design

An interesting article here on the current state of sensor design based on DXo sensor measurements


For me the takeaways are:


  - At high ISOs Canon, Nikon, Sony and probably others are roughly on par.


  - At low ISOs Sony seems to be the king of dynamic range attributed to their advanced on chip per-column A/D design, Nikon is close, and Canon a distant third (probably due to off chip A/D conversion). The speculation is that when Canon brings in their next chip process/design, they will probably catch up.


 - Medium format sensors are not as advanced as they could be given their fundamental advantage of large size.

Interesting article

Good stuff, thanks for the link. I read that as Nikon having somewhat of a lead, with their Sony manufactured sensors. I've never been clear on the Nikon-Sony relationship and who's adding what to the design. The low-ISO numbers of recent Nikons seem to be generally better than Sony's using the DxO numbers. For example, why isn't the NEX 5R sensor able to match the DR of the older D7000's sensor, which also beats the Sony for high ISO noise? I shoot NEX when I need something compact, and the results just aren't that close to my D800, including when the D800's cropped to a similar size. Just wish my D800 would focus right so I could make use of that...