PeterK

Hello Andrew. First I want to thank you for your blog. I learned a lot from it and it led me to GH2, which I am very happy with ;-) Today I was reading your review of D5200, I wanted to advise my friend, who is looking for new DSLR. I was impressed with the D5200 sharpness that was brought up after postprocessing. It looked very much like the GH2 sharpness king. Out of curiosity I downloaded your full-res frames, to check how the direct-from-camera D5200 frame behaves under Unsharp mask in Photoshop. (I know it's not the same thing as Sharpen in PP, but in my experience Photoshop Unsharp mask is still the king of all sharpening plugins I came across, so it is at least as good as Sharpen in PP). And the results of my test left me puzzled. The 2 frames you provided in your review are not the same. But that's not really a problem, they just could be consecutive frames (with equal sharpness). The problem is, that the so called sharpened frame has much more detail that is ever possible to bring out from the direct-from-camera frame. The direct-from-camera frame has hardly any microdetail and what's left is largely destroyed by the compression. Only compression artifacts and coarser detail can be brought up with sharpening. How can the sharpened frame be so much more detailed than the direct-from-camera frame? If I ignore the sharpened frame, direct-from-camera frame would lead me to conclusion, that D5200 is not only much softer than GH2, but also that most of any possible microdetail will be destroyed by the compression (at least at higher ISOs). What am I missing here Andrew? Thank you for your time.