Dennis Mook of The Wandering Lensman recently asked himself the question: is the X-Trans II sensor of the X-T1 capable of capturing very wide dynamic range, and if so, is HDR really necessary?
To answer this question, he performed an interesting experiment on a very sunny day in the countryside of southeastern Virginia. Upon finding a scene with lots of deep shadows and bright sunshine, he took three images taken one stop apart and later merged them in Lightroom into one 32-bit DNG file. He then opened the shadows and reduced the highlights of this combined image, and tried to match the result by doing the same to a single RAW file and a single JPG of the same scene.
Barring a few small differences in colour, he was surprised to find that the three images were almost identical even after pulling out the detail from the shadows and highlights. As he states:
[It is] simply amazing compared to what was available to us as digital photographers only a few years ago.
You can visit the full article and see the images he took here.
Dennis Mook of The Wandering Lens