About a week ago I took the Mamiya ZD to the Fort Worth Stockyards and rattled off 175 images. I was having an off day, and to be blunt the pictures stunk. No fault of the ZD, I just sucked. Despite the pictures looking pretty bad, I felt I had a good idea of ZD’s capabilities in terms of dynamic range, color, noise, etc. I had it all figured out.

Today the ZD had the obligatory Highland Park torture test - bright reflections, bright foliage to the east and dark shadows to the west. For most shots the camera is aimed either north or south, so one side of the frame is bright and the opposite side is very dark. Historically the 1Ds3 has struggled at this location and tended to blow highlights fairly often. Where the 1Ds3 has struggled, the ZD powered through and handled the dynamic range better than the 1Ds2, 1Ds3, M8, D300 and 40D. Last year the Phase One P25 did well here too, but needed some trial and error with negative EC adjustment to keep the highlights under control. I definitely like the colors from ZD better than the Phase Phase P25, but P25 did have cleaner shadows at ISO 50. All of today’s pictures were processed with RAW Developer (which I am loving) and then enhanced with saturation and levels edits in Photoshop.

I have taken a couple thousand pictures here, so I know the location and lighting condition fairly well. Today certainly was not a scientific test, but subjectively I was very impressed with ZD’s performance. And I was nailing focus with the Mamiya 150mm F3.5 AF - so good times! And here I thought I had the ZD all figured out...  Even the guy above is shocked...  Have a Happy Thanksgiving.