Owning both a Canon 20D and now an R-D1 I can say the 20D's extra pixels come in handy for large-ish prints. Photos from the 20D at ISO 100 have a smoother look than R-D1 photos at ISO 200 as well. (Note that both cameras are more sensitive to light than their ISO ratings suggest.) This all disappears in a 6x9" print, which is my most common size and has been so for many years going back to b&w darkroom days. (I'm not a fan of huge prints.) I can tell the difference between a 6x9" 20D print and a same-size R-D1 print because of the different tonal signatures of the two cameras. Detail-wise, though...forget it. 6x9" isn't large enough unless I've severely cropped the photo. At 8x12" I can see extra detail from the 20D in side-by-side prints if the subject matter contains fine detail. This is as expected, and the R-D1 performs identically to the Canon 10D (mine now belongs to my dad) in this respect.
When it comes to tonality I give the R-D1 the nod. Both the 10D and 20D push upper midrange tones toward the top of the tonal scale while the Epson leaves them in the upper midrange. This is obvious, for example, when taking photos of a medium contrast scene with a dull grey/blue sky in the frame. First of all the Canon's meter wants to blow out the sky. So you have to set negative exposure compensation or use the camera in manual mode to record any sky detail. Then you find the camera has drained most of the color from the sky anyway. It's not blown out, just monochrome. This is in the RAW data. No matter what I did in Photoshop CS's converter or Canon's own DPP I couldn't find any significant color info in there.
The R-D1 OTOH gets the exposure right without adjustment. This is a simple centerweighted meter, remember, not a high-tech evaluative system like Canon uses. (So how come Canon's meter still can't properly handle a scene like this after four generations of consumer-level D-SLRs?) The grey/blue sky is rendered grey/blue, with more blue content than in reality but at least there's
color. I've noticed this sort of thing in a number of photos. Sometimes I prefer the Canon rendering...it leads to a higher contrast look by default. But usually I prefer the R-D1's look. Somehow Epson is managing to fit a finer range of tones into the same 12-bit capture space.
The main reason I got the R-D1 had little to do with any of this, though.
I wanted a reasonably compact, unobtrusive digital camera with full manual control and higher image quality than current consumer digicams offer. The fact that I already had a full range of small & light M & LTM lenses ready to work on such a camera had an influence too! It's cool to be able to use a modern technology camera with lenses designed well before the ENIAC was first powered up. Beyond that it's great to be able to use an RF camera that fits seamlessly into my current photo processing workflow.
-Dave-
