If you've been following this channel you probably have noticed that I mostly use Canon cameras and
I have no particular brand allegiance to Canon but when you have as many Canon EF lenses and
accessories as i do it makes the most sense to keep going with the same camera system whether
that's Canon or Nikon or Sony however at times i have been tempted to switch. I even bought a Nikon
D800 for astrophotography and for a while I used that before i got the Canon EOS Ra at which point
i sold it and Nikon cameras are preferred by many astrophotographers over canon as their cameras
especially the recent ones tend to have sensors that are lower noise and more iso invariant than
canon the actual reason behind this is because Nikon switched over to using Sony sensors and
Canon still does all their sensor design in-house and they're just behind Sony in terms of absolute
performance of their sensors by the way most of the popular CMOS astronomy cameras from ZWO,
QHY, etc also use these same Sony sensors that are in the Nikon DSLR and both the Sony and Nikon
mirrorless cameras. But something i've always wondered is how much does using canon which has
the slightly noisier sensors really matter when it comes to our final results as astrophotographers
because you usually just see the two camps someone who shoots only canon someone shoots only nikon
and they argue but we know that sensor noise is only one thing that impacts the kinds of results
you can expect so what i'm going to explore in this video and i did a few real world tests to
actually figure this out is if i keep all the other factors the same same telescope same night
sky same settings can we see a difference between canon and nikon and a quick note before we dig
into this comparison i received this full spectrum nikon d5300 from night sky camera who were
interested in letting me use this camera for the channel however i wished and night sky camera is
an awesome business out of vancouver in canada and they sell pre-modified canon and nikon dslrs or
they can also modify your dslr if it's one of the ones that they work on and this particular nikon
d5300 is a full spectrum mod so it can be used for infrared photography with an ir pass filter
and they also change the positioning of the sensor so that autofocus should still work i don't have
any nikon lenses to test that but i do believe them and so it's a very cool camera i've had a
blast using it and let's dig in first let's look a little bit at the features in this nikon d5300
compared to your typical canon dslr and i'll be using a modded canon 60d as my comparator here
it's a bit older but it's a popular choice to have modded in the canon world just like the d5300 is a
very popular choice for mods for nikon and this is going to be a short section because they're really
mostly well matched when it comes to features that would be important to an astrophotographer
both these models have fully articulating screens that you can fold away or more importantly point
up which is huge when pointing up at the night sky and needing to see the screen
and they both have a nice live view option for focusing and star hopping and things like that
on the canon you press the q button to access the quick menu items and on the nikon it's the
i button and that lets you change things like iso shooting mode and those kinds of things quickly
the main difference and it's definitely a point for nikon is the nikon menu has an
internal interval shooting mode in the menu and this is often called an internal intervalometer
from what i could tell it doesn't completely replace the need for an external intervalometer
because i can only set the interval not the bulb timing so it would only work for doing a
sequence of shots if i limited the exposure time to 30 seconds if i wanted to do for instance a
sequence of three minute exposures i'd still have to use an external intervalometer or a computer to
control the camera so it is a plus for the nikon because especially with fast lens based shooting
i'm often just doing 30 second sub exposures now outside of the features of the cameras themselves
another thing worth looking at is accessories that you might want to buy to go with the camera
and in terms of software support they both seem to have plenty of options in terms of connecting
to a pc and running them from software to control the exposures and things like that they also both
have intervalometer ports and plenty of options there for lenses both again have plenty of options
and sigma makes the art series lenses for both nikon f and canon ef so you have some of the best
lenses out there for astrophotography available for both camera systems the one big difference
in accessory support is clip-in filters there are so many more for the canon aps-c
bodies which all have the same internal structure and that accepts this clip and filter quite easily
it's much more difficult though for nikon and the only ones the only clip-in filters that i can find
for this d5300 are the stc optical filters out of hong kong so it's not that they don't exist
but you just don't have nearly as many options for clip-ins as you would with canon to prepare
for this showdown i took a look at bill klaff's photons to photos website and the input referred
read noise chart gives you a pretty good idea of what we call the iso and variance of these
two cameras so i'm just going to pick the 60d and the nikon d50 300 here to compare and you can see
that the nikon has a much flatter curve meaning using it for long exposures at lower iso like 400
or even 200 should pose no significant problems in terms of a read noise hit while with the canon 60d
i wouldn't advise using it below something like iso 1600 for stacked deep sky imaging
and the reason you might want to use lower iso and longer exposures is to increase the
potential for dynamic range in your image so you could retain good star color and the bright
highlights while bringing out the very faint detail like dusty objects and things like that
so dynamic range is typically decreased as you increase iso because the full well capacity at
each photo site is diminished now interestingly the canon and nikon cameras seem to converge in
terms of read noise right at iso 3200 which is already an iso i use a lot for deep sky imaging
so that will be an interesting comparison between the two the other interesting comparison is for
longer exposures at a much lower iso so for that i picked iso 400 because the read noise is almost
doubled for the canon versus the nikon at iso 400. okay and on to the main event here which
is direct comparisons these were taken on the same night with the same lens which was the asgar
200 millimeter astro camera lens at f4 uh from a bordeal four sky with no moonlight i'm using
my standard uh testing subject here which is the north america nebula and the first thing
we're going to look at is just single 30 second exposures straight from camera i did just uh the
only thing i did here was an auto stretch of each image and lined them up uh with registration so
that we could do direct comparisons so we have i'm going to go through a number of comparisons
here the canon is always going to be on the left and the nikon is always going to be on the right
and again this is a single 30 second exposure this gives you an idea of what it looks like
zoomed out but now let's do some zoom ins because that's where we're going to really see
any differences in noise if there are any and remember this is at iso 3200 where according to
that website photons to photos the read noise is about the same on these two cameras and
i think i do see a little bit more noise on the canon it just looks a little grainier
and then where there is pops of color the color is a little bit more intense than here in a single
30 second nikon so i'd say it's visually it's pretty close but uh the canon definitely has
just a little bit more noise visually in a single 30 second exposure without calibration okay let's
next look at that same single 30 second exposure but now calibrated with bias flats and darks
and again here's what it looks like zoomed out
now let's zoom in again uh i mean it's really just sort of a different quality of noise i
guess in a sense but i do think that i see a little bit of banding already even in a
single 30 second exposure with the canon well on the nikon the noise looks more random and
distributed evenly while i can see a little bit of sort of pattern in the canon which looks like it
could pose an issue okay but the proof is going to be in the stacked results so here is 18 30 second
exposures stacked canon on the left nikon on the right and these look both look pretty good you
can see that there's some color differences but these are different mods the canon is is an ha mod
the nikon is a full spectrum bear sensor so there's some differences there
let's zoom in again
and you know stacked i'm seeing much less difference between the two in terms of the noise
you know the probably the nikon maybe just edges out the the canon but i'm seeing really
about the same level of detail let's zoom in even a little bit more
we're getting into sort of blocky stars territory now but that's okay
that's really close you know we're i think we're seeing a few more stars
on the nikon because it's full spectrum so we get some of those infrared stars
but you can definitely tell the difference between stars and noise and in terms of just you know
the amount of detail shown and the amount of random noise i really am not seeing
a huge difference between these two well i'll i'll let everyone who's watching uh be the judge
here i don't i'm not seeing much of a difference uh which is i guess what i expected to not see a
huge difference if the read noise is going to be the same at iso 3200 but uh they look pretty close
and again this is the canon 60d 18 frame stacked the nikon d5300
18 frames at 30 seconds iso 3200 stacked okay so now on to the the final event and this is
where nikon i think has the chance to really show its stuff we did a single four minute
exposure at iso 400 where the read noise on the canon is double that of the nikon and
i don't know if you can see this in the video but i'm already seeing issues here on the canon even
zoomed out all the way so i think nikon is going to beat the canon here handily but let's go ahead
and zoom in and take a look yeah and so here this is where uh you know earlier i think when we were
looking at photons to photos the website i said i wouldn't use canon at below iso 1600 part of it is
what we call the read noise but another part here is just that when you get to those lower isos on
canon cameras this horizontal banding really shows up that's quite noticeable you can see it here the
really strong line right there while here on the nikon i don't see any banding whatsoever
otherwise yeah even just you know if we look at some of these finer details here on the nikon
they're starting to really come into their own even in a single formatted exposure because we
don't have as much noise and in the canon they're really getting lost in the noise those dim
details now of course in the high signal areas there's not going to be nearly as much difference
between the two so in the in the bright parts here of orion nebula you're not going to see
much difference yeah i mean it really depends on the part of the scene you're looking at like here
i don't see a huge difference there's definitely more green noise
it looks like on the canon you can see in this little blue reflection nebula right here it looks
so it looks sort of green in the canon well uh it looks better in the nikon but it's really
here when we just get to the empty sky you see all this banding this horizontal banding going down in
the empty sky area while in the in the nikon the noise is much more evenly distributed throughout
well hopefully this gives you an idea i mean i i can definitely see a difference it's maybe not as
extreme as i was expecting but there's definitely a difference here and the nikon did beat out the
the canon in this iso 400 challenge so to end with going back to the title of this video i'm not
going to switch to team nikon at the moment i've developed a style of imaging with canon cameras
where i use full calibration i work at the right iso and that works fine for me
i don't feel like i'm missing so much but i have nothing against nikon and i'll gladly acknowledge
that their sensors are more iso and variant and typically will have lower noise at lower isos
which has definite advantages for deep sky imaging the big downside to nikon
crop sensor dslrs is they have very limited clip in filter selection so if you're mostly
a lens based shooter rather than a telescope based shooter and you want to use filters
then canon is a better bet for that well there are many other camera brands to try i think the next
one on my list that i'd like to try is fuji not much support for astro accessories but they make
some really interesting cameras and i've seen some cool results with fuji cameras hope my reasoning
here all made sense i want to thank night sky camera again for sending this nikon d5300 which
made this shootout possible until next time this has been Nico Carver nebulaphotos.com clear skies