DXOMark - Oops?

I have a great deal of empathy for DXOMark on this one.  It's a very difficult task to create reliable scientific tests of cameras and lenses, and some times, mistakes do happen.  DXO certainly doesn't make alot of them.  While I encourage people to totally ignore their "scores" the underlying data is valuable.

Well, it seems that DXO made a big mistake on the 1DX Mark III review, as they have posted on their review;

A previous version of this review, published June 19, 2020, contained erroneous test data that affected the scoring. This new version of the review contains the correct data and scores. We regret any inconvenience this may have caused Canon and our readers.

In case you didn't catch it originally, DXOMark gave the 1DX Mark III a rather low overall score of 83, with portrait color depth marks of 23.4 bits, landscape (dynamic range) at 13.4 EV and sports score of 2445.  I looked at the results originally and didn't think much of it, but the results were actually worse than the 1DX Mark II - especially the sports score which was 3207.  Since I rarely follow DXO I simply dismissed it.

Well, it turns out all that data was basically, well, trash.

Whoops.

I suspect what happened is accidentally another camera's results that ended up in the 1DX Mark III data, or they simply messed the data up.

Whatever the case, the 1DX Mark III according to DXO is essentially tied with the A9 Mark II overall, with greater DR, and lesser color depth.  How they calculate out low light performance is dependant on color depth, so if the color depth numbers are different so will be their low light ISO scores.  But really, you can't go wrong with any of the sports cameras but should focus more on focus performance, build quality, professional support,  because they are all basically equal in terms of image quality.

That's pretty crazy when you think of the raw performance of the 1DX Mark III sensor and image pipeline.  Not only has Canon created a remarkable image quality sensor, but at the same time, they improved the performance dramatically.  And that's without high tech wizardry such as stacked sensors.

This data is also important because it should give you a good idea on how the R6 performs.

Some credit to DXO for catching the mistake, acknowledging it, and correcting it.

Richard CanonNewsRichard CanonNews

Richard has been using Canon cameras since the 1990s, with his first being the now legendary EOS-3. Since then, Richard has continued to use Canon cameras and now focuses mostly on infrared photography. Richard is the founder and editor of CanonNews since 2017, and has worked as a writer on CanonRumors and other websites in the past.

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