JGobeil
Nature Photographer
Jules,
Ok, you're right. The Nikon gear was a D200 plus 70-200/2.8 AFS VR and the digiscoping rig was the 8400 plus Swarovski ATS80HD scope and Sw 30x eyepiec. So the Nikon was 350 mm and the digiscoping rig was 1110 mm. Neil.
Thanks for the info. This is an interesting quiz. I took the liberty to copy your photographs but the copies were destroyed afterwards. I enlarged them 300% in PS. The noise and cropping/enlarging artefacts ON the bird seems similar, the noise and cropping/enlarging artefacts AROUND the bird silhouette seems higher on Camera B but there is not much difference. However, the cropping/enlarging artefacts on the background are MUCH LOWER on Camera A.
This leads me to believe that Camera A was the digiscoping setup since you did not have to crop it to compare it with the other one. Of course, if you have applied gaussian blur on the background.... but that would not be fair, isn't !
IMO, to the eye, both birds are quite similar in terms of overall quality and sharpness but the difference in the backgrounds is visible. This is a difficult test since we are looking at 400x544 px images.
How far were you from the bird ?