Digital Home Thoughts - News & Reviews for the Digital Home

DXO Labs is known for some of the most scientific camera tests in the world; their software is used by many top magazines and Web sites for analyzing camera and lens performance. I stumbled across their comparison page last week and plugged in my three main camera bodies: a Panasonic GF1, Nikon D5000, and Nikon D300. The results were pretty interesting - I wasn't expecting the D5000 to rate higher than the much more expensive D300 in the areas of low-light performance and the overall sensor score. I don't know enough about the data points they're using to generate these scores...what I do know is that I find my D300 infinitely nicer to shoot with than my D5000. Not that there's anything wrong with the D5000 of course, but the D300 is a much more satisfying overall camera experience. Plug in your DSLR (or Micro Four-Thirds) camera and see what DXO Labs has to say about it!

Tom's Hardware is one of the best sites out there for really understanding computer hardware, and they have a section I hadn't noticed before: the Performance Charts. They've collected benchmark information from their various reviews and plugged the results into this system, and it allows you to look at a particular category of hardware (say, hard drives) and drill down to see exact benchmark results - like the read performance using h2benchw for instance. It makes it much easier to pick the exact hardware you want!