Nikon D610 / D600 vs Canon 6D Epic Shootout Comparison

When the Nikon D600 was first announced, there was tremendous amount of excitement about all the wonderful features packed into this full-frame Nikon camera. At 24 megapixels, it has 39 focusing points, nine of which are cross-type. It shoots at a very respectable 5.5 frames per second in its burst mode, has a built-in flash and wireless transmitter, it features two SD memory card slots, it has HDMI out, has a headphone jack, it even does tracking while shooting in live view for video. It's also rated to 150,000 shots. At an initial list price of $2,100, even over the last couple months, we've seen the price come down, and you can even get a kit lens with it now for less than $2,000. I would expect we would see the price come down even more. When Canon responded a few months later with its full-frame 6D, I think the initial reaction was that of being underwhelmed. The Canon 6D features 20 megapixels, 11 focusing squares, only one of which are cross-type, and it shoots at 4.5 frames per second in its burst mode. The 6D unfortunately lacks a flash, doesn't have a transmitter, has no headphone jack, and it has only one SD memory card slot. While it does have some new video formats, it is only rated to 100,000 shots. Now there are a couple cool things about the 6D. The Wi-Fi tethering is absolutely a very, very cool feature. It will allow you to connect with your camera by an iPhone, Android device, or even your iPad. You can take pictures, you can review them, you can change your settings, and even get a preview of your shot in real time. Despite all these little extra bonuses, I still think that most Canon users were a little disappointed. You know, we wanted to see really more focusing squares. That's what everybody wanted to see. But I've been shooting as a pro for 10 years now, and I have learned that the specs on paper don't always translate into real world shooting experience. Until you take a camera out and you really, really shoot with it, you never really know what you're getting. Now I'm about to share some things with you that are going to come as a bit of a shock and a surprise. I took both cameras out, took them all over the island, shot literally thousands of shots on both cameras, and spent a lot of time on this. I've also made training videos for both cameras in the Nikon D600 crash course and the Canon 6D crash course. I'm fairly confident when I say I really know these cameras inside and out, and I can give you some information that will help you make an informed decision if you're thinking about about buying either one of them. The short answer is this is not an apples-to-apples comparison. I think, you know, when I did the 5D Mark II compared with the 6D, it was fairly black and white in terms of which camera was better. This is a little different. There's a lot of gray area, and my recommendation is going to change depending on what kind of photographer you are and what type of shooting you are most interested in. And as a side note, please do not be offended if you feel I'm being critical about one or the other cameras. I own both of them. I'm keeping both of them, and there's really no benefit for me to say, hey, this is what I've noticed. Maybe you'll see the same thing when you're shooting. Just don't take it personally. One of the first questions that I needed to have answered was, how do the focusing systems compare? And the two main tests that I did was a servo tracking, which is predictive focus for sports shooting, and also a low light test. And I found some very interesting things about both cameras when they were performed. When we look through the viewfinder of each camera, we can see how the focus points are configured differently. The D600, again, has 39 focus points, nine of which are cross-type in the center. The Canon 6D has 11 focus points with only one central cross-type focus square. The three servo tests I wanted to perform were, number one, side-to-side tracking with the sun behind the shooter. Number two, I wanted to see how the cameras performed when the subject was moving towards the camera when shooting with his or her back to the sun. Number three, a subject moving away from the shooter and also shooting into the sun. The plan was to shoot on the servo mode of each camera, which is a predictive focus. I would use the furthest left or right focus squares, shoot on JPEG, shoot on the high speed continuous burst, and then I would count the shots that were out of focus and find a percentage based on that total. For the side-to-side test, the Nikon D600 scored 96% and the Canon 92%. What this means is that for side-to-side action, if you are shooting in plenty of good light, you aren't going to see much of a difference between the two. This makes a lot of sense to me because when you're shooting a side-to-side moving subject, the focus distance doesn't change that much. For the second test, a forward moving subject, the D600 scored 81% accuracy. The 6D, 70% accuracy. Both cameras were starting to struggle, but the D600 was a little bit better. For the third test, which is absolutely brutal for sports focusing, the D600 scored 76%, in the 6D, a 63%. Now please keep in mind, this was not a scientific test. A lot of this is subjective. I'm just trying to get a basic idea of how the servo accuracy of the two cameras compare to each other. All things being equal, from what I can tell, this D600 has the edge on subjects moving towards or away from the camera. For side-to-side action, there isn't much difference. While the 6D doesn't have the same number of focus squares, I would also say that it is still plenty capable for shooting sports in good lighting conditions. One thing I did notice was that the camera's burst rating performed very differently when certain JPEG settings were turned on. For example, if you tweak picture controls, and especially something called auto distortion control on the D600, the burst rate is cannibalized. Listen to the burst rate with all these settings turned on, shooting JPEG only. Can you hear how the frames per second slow down after the initial bursts? The Canon 6D seems to maintain its burst rate when these same equivalent settings are turned on. So just keep in mind, do not turn on auto distortion control on the D600 if you like that 5.5 frames per second. On both cameras, shooting in RAW will also greatly affect your frames per second after the first few shots. So one test I know that everybody's interested in is how well do the cameras focus in low light. The Canon 6D is rated down to negative 3 exposure values, and that's very very dark. So without going into too much of the methodology, which I've already posted on my blog, just for the sake of time, I'm going to explain what I did, but if you do want to repeat the experiment yourself, all the details are there and you can read about it. The gist of it is, I used two targets. Both are black gaffer's tape. I posted a series of black gaffer's tape marks up next to a fluorescent lamp on my wall. That's target one, brightly lit, and the second is underneath my desk in a very low light situation. I put it there because based on my experience as a wedding photographer, I kind of have an idea when a camera is going to start to struggle with getting focus lock. Now when we focus one time with one camera, it usually takes, you know, maybe a little over a second, maybe a little bit longer, maybe a little quicker, and it's much harder to compare cameras when you're just focusing one time. And what I decided to do was to focus on target one, focus on the dark target, which is target two, and then defocus the camera back to target one and do this back and forth 30 times. This forces the camera to have to refocus every single time we come back to that dark target. If I'm just focusing on the dark target, the camera doesn't really have to work that much. We have to kind of reset it. If there are major performance differences between each of the cameras, we should be able to see it after 30 focus locks back and forth. Now I'm not going to redo the whole experiment because this is going to be a fairly long video anyway, but I did want to show you how the test looked, how I performed it, and I also want you to listen to how the cameras are focusing. How quick does the focus happen? Another important note is that I have this video light on. I'm going to have to turn it off because it is illuminating underneath my desk, so it's going to get fairly dark in here, and we're going to start with the Nikon D600. So I have a starting point where I line up and get my first focus lock and start the timer, which is an iPhone, and then I just go back and forth 30 times, and this is what it looks like. And so you can hear that the D600 is very, very fast. It's really awesome. Super great focusing system. Let's try it again with the Canon 6D. An important thing to note is that I am using the central focusing square. There we go. That happens. So you can probably notice that the 6D is much slower on Target 2. So in fact, when I went through 30 focus locks for each camera, the Nikon D600 came in at an astounding 51 seconds. The Canon 6D came in at 76 seconds, a full 25 seconds longer to go through 30 focus locks. In this case, the D600 is the clear winner. But there is a very important note that I have to make. When using the D600 the first time through, it has a built-in autofocus assist lamp. It's actually a very great feature because you can turn it on or off, and it's going to illuminate your targets in very dark conditions, up to 30 feet. The Canon 6D does not have a built-in autofocus assist lamp. So now this raises some interesting questions. If, for example, you're shooting a wedding reception, for example, or ceremony, and the director tells you to turn off your autofocus assist lamp, or maybe you're a street photographer who doesn't want to attract attention, or maybe, I don't know, you're a wildlife photographer in low light, you don't want to spook the animals, there are going to be some times you're going to want to turn it off. How well does the Nikon D600 perform without its autofocus assist lamp on? So we're going to repeat the experiment now with the AF lamp turned off. Listen. Through many focus attempts in low light on a low contrast target, which is black gaffer's tape on gray carpet, the Nikon D600 is unable to attain focus lock. This can be a concern for some shooters. How does the Canon 6D do when it has an autofocus assist lamp turned on? And in one of the forums, one of the posters there suggested that a repeat test using a Canon EX Speedlite, which I do have that on there, because as many of you know, Speedlites do have an autofocus assist beam. And I repeated the experiment. In fact, through 30 focus locks, the Canon 6D with a Speedlite autofocus assist came in at just over 53 seconds, almost as fast as the Nikon D600. And obviously there's going to be some variation every time I do it, but for the most part, autofocus assist beams on both cameras, very similar performance. Now I've done these tests over and over again, many times, and I'm trying to give you guys the best information that I've learned from them. Sorry if this is taking so long, but if you are a Nikon D600 owner and you're having some problems focusing it in low light, I can offer this. Aim for high contrast targets. The target on the ground is black gaffer's tape on gray carpet. When I replace it with a white balance card in black gaffer's tape like this, it actually does fine. So I'm going to replace that, turn the light off, D600, no focus lamp on, so you can hear it's doing just fine. In fact, to go through 30 focus locks on a high contrast target, it takes 50, just over 58 seconds. So it does very, very well if your target is bright enough. So in conclusion on the low light focusing test, we've learned many interesting things. With the autofocus assist lamp on, the Nikon D600 wins. With that light turned off, the Canon 6D wins. It's actually a very good focusing camera in low light. When they both have an autofocus assist lamp turned on, it's about even. And if we have high contrast target, the Nikon D600 also does very, very well in low light. I'm going to get a light meter and measure exactly what the EV value is here. But for now, suffice it to say, it's really dark. But I'll be posting it on the YouTube video, and you can see it as soon as I can. I shot plenty of portrait images with both cameras with similar type lenses in similar conditions. There are a few important notes. Look at the pixel dimensions on the D600, and this is where that extra 4 megapixels is going to make a difference. If maximum resolution is important to you, this is an important consideration. Now occasionally, each camera produced a very different looking result. For example, look at the flesh tones on Annie in a similar type shot, similar conditions, similar lenses. It looks very different. A lot of this is going to come down to personal taste and preference. On the other hand, there were many other occasions where it was very difficult to tell any difference at all between the two when shooting portraits. It was very hard for me to nail down when this was happening versus when it wasn't. Traditionally, Canons seem to lean a little bit more towards magentas and reds. Nikons tend to lean a little bit more towards greens and blues. But for the most part, I was very happy with both cameras when shooting portraits, and I'm going to have to call this one a tie. For the auto white balance test, I took a picture of a black and 18% gray card on a white background in four different lighting conditions. Sunlight, shade, tungsten, and fluorescent light. I brought the images into Photoshop and color corrected the gray card, and what I noticed was that natural light, such as sun or outdoor shade, both cameras were accurate and very similar. We see the biggest differences in artificial light, such as tungsten and fluorescent, even after white balancing. And a lot of this again is going to come down to personal preference and what you like. The 6D had a teeny bit more red and less blues than the Nikon, which might explain some of the differences we're seeing in the portrait shots. But I will say the auto white balance works very well in both cameras, and I'm not seeing any major white balance issues. I'm going to call this one also a tie. In-camera HDR is really not a game changer, but it is getting better, and I find myself using it more and more for these quick sunset type shoots. This feature allows photographers to get details from bright highlights as well as dark shadows in the same image. While the D600 was clearly faster in performing this feature, time and again its subject matter appeared to be blurry or to have a ghosting artifact when I was hand holding the camera. For example, take a look at these trees as well as these clouds on the Nikon. Look at the sharpness around the sun on the 6D compared with the D600. While the 6D took forever to perform the feature, I think the quality was consistently better. The next thing I was interested in learning was how well do the cameras perform in low light when we bump up our ISO. I learned some very interesting things such as your subject does make a difference, and your file formats also do not respond the same way. So your JPEGs, your RAWs, and your video files are all going to behave a little bit differently. The first test that I performed was a low light candle test. I just simply lit a candle, set up both cameras side by side with the same exact camera settings, and I slowly bumped up the ISO and stopped the aperture down to try to have the same kind of exposure. And what I learned was that the Nikon D600 seems to peak out a little before an ISO of 3200. The Canon 6D looked pretty phenomenal at 12,000 and in some cases 25,000 ISO. For the most part, I can confidently say that the 6D is at least two stops better in its ISO noise for video. Another thing that I noticed about the ISO noise in video was the blacks are much cleaner in the 6D. The Nikon D600 struggles with with darker tones and shades as you increase your ISO. A lot of RAW shooters were asking me what does the banding look like when you shoot in low light and you increase the exposure by two stops. This is a very common thing that RAW shooters see is this horizontal line banding. In terms of the banding test, I would say that the Nikon D600 peaks out at 6,400 ISO and the Canon 6D looks pretty good again up to 12,800. Now JPEG images did look a little bit better in both cameras. The Nikon D600 seemed to peak out at about 6,400 and the Canon 6D again looked very very good all the way up to 25,000 which is phenomenal for a camera. As a side note, it seems that the 6D's improved ISO performance comes with a price and that is a softer looking image. The higher your ISO, the softer the image starts to appear. Now while many of these very high ISO images are usable, just know that there is going to be sharpness loss. So in terms of high ISO noise tests, I would say the advantage definitely goes to the Canon 6D at least by one stop and in many cases two full stops. At this point in my testing, I was starting to come to the conclusion that the Canon 6D is a phenomenal low light performance camera for both its focusing as well as its low ISO noise. Now I know many of you are not going to like the things that I'm saying about these file sizes, but I can say this is that you can download the actual JPEGs and raw images that I used in the testing. I've made them available on my blog and you can compare for yourself and see the difference. Now I know many of you are wondering about the video quality of both cameras and so what I decided to do was to take them out and shoot side by side in different circumstances, lighting conditions, and different subject matters. It's important for me to note that I tried to use the same settings on both cameras. I had a 24-70 2.8 lens on both cameras. I used the neutral picture style with sharpness turned down, contrast turned halfway down, and everything else was left the same. Now I have this wonderful shirt that has these horizontal lines in it that's great for detecting moiré. Moiré is this splotchy banding that you see that when you're using DSLR cameras. Some cameras do better, some do worse. The Canon 6D and the Nikon D600 both performed pretty bad in that moiré test. Now I don't know if you're able to see it here on this rock because YouTube compresses the video a little bit, but the 6D definitely has some aliasing going on and you're also going to notice that it oversaturates in the reds. So you may want to turn your saturation down. When I applied a sharpening filter to both sets of footage, they sharpened up pretty well and when I added a saturation filter, I thought the D600 looked great. But that said, there were other times when I added a sharpening and a saturation filter that the D600 footage started showing lots of artifacts and noise. So subject matter does make a difference. There have been various reports of oil specks occasionally appearing on the D600 sensor and I can confirm I did run into this. It wasn't a huge deal as I just cleaned it, but this is something you may encounter and you should know about. A few things I can tell you for certain about the D600 is that when I did the dynamic range test, which measures a camera's ability to capture both bright highlights as well as details and shadows, the D600 was more impressive and I thought it did a much better job. I was always seeing better detail in the shadows. The elephant in the room that I could not get away from was wondering how does the video from these two cameras compare to that of the 5D Mark III, which has a very good reputation for video coming out of a DSLR. So I decided to shoot with all three cameras together and I wanted you guys to take a look at this road shot. We're going to see a car driving through the middle of the screen on all three cameras at the same time. Which camera do you feel did the best job of handling aliasing and moiré? That's right, the bottom camera, which was the 5D Mark III, has minimal aliasing and is the most impressive. In fact, the more I shot with all three cameras together, the more I saw that the 5D Mark III, it wasn't perfect, but it consistently performed better. So in terms of video recommendations and the video summary, I'm going to have to be a little specific. The Nikon D600 has the best dynamic range of the three cameras. Its weakness is when you start adding lots of post-production colors or when you are shooting in very low light using very high ISOs. If you're recording video mostly in well-lit conditions, it is going to be a great video camera. The Canon 6D has major problems with aliasing and moiré. Whatever is in the 5D Mark III that makes it look so good, it is not in the 6D. It's still a very solid performing video camera, but you can expect to see these weaknesses. On the other hand, the 6D had the best high ISO performance for video. The Canon 5D Mark III overall, I feel, did the best for video mainly because of the moiré and aliasing was minimal. That's not something you can just clean up in post-production. If you're very, very serious about getting quality video, the 5D Mark III is the way to go. If you're on a tight budget, you may even want to consider getting a used one. I think if you're a casual shooter or even a semi-pro, I think any of these three cameras are going to be excellent. Just be aware of their strengths and weaknesses. Something I wanted to point out in terms of operational efficiencies is the difference or the time it takes or the number of steps it takes to change your aperture. On the Canon 6D, you can see that I have aperture control with my secondary selector. Pretty straightforward. Let's say I go from 2.8 to maybe 5.0. No big deal, right? One of the problems with the Nikon D600 is that it takes multiple button presses to do the same thing. So I can change my shutter speed, as you can see with my command dial. I can change my ISO, also getting an exposure preview. But I cannot change my aperture. And in order to do this, I have to exit live view, push the info button so I can see what I'm doing, change the aperture to 5.0, and then go back to live view to preview the shot. So I literally have to push three extra buttons that I don't have to push on the Canon 6D. I don't think beginning and intermediate photographers or videographers are going to have a problem with this. I think the pros are going to have a problem if they're changing their settings many many times a day, where they have to exit live view, change, see look, change the aperture, and then re-enter live view to preview the shot. Another thing that I need to point out when you're using live view, especially for photography, is there are a couple caveats. And one of them, maybe I'm doing this wrong, is that you do not get an accurate exposure preview. Notice how I'm changing my exposure settings, which does work in the photography live view mode, but the exposure preview is not changing, no matter what the settings are. So if I were to take a picture, look what happens. Focus lock, great. The picture is underexposed. So this is a problem, in that you cannot preview the exposure in live view for stills. Go back out. Something we can do is to use our exposure compensation, and then just kind of dial it in so we know we're underexposed right now, and then we can take a picture and inspect it. Another thing about ISO changing on the photography mode versus the video mode is that it is not a global change. So if I'm at an ISO of 400, and I go up to let's say an ISO of 800, watch what happens when I flip the switch down to video mode. It goes to the last ISO setting. So the ISO changes are not global. You have to kind of constantly reset your camera settings every time you change between the modes. So I'm at 63.5. Let's go to 320, 3.5, come back up. The exposure settings are different. Not a big deal, but if you are a professional who is making many many changes throughout the day, it's going to get a little tiresome. So in conclusion, I need to make a few recommendations, and this is hard for me to do because again, I don't see these cameras as being equal. I think they perform differently in different conditions. If you're a Nikon user, you're going to stick with Nikon anyway. If you're a Canon user, stick with Canon. Overall though, I will say I was very impressed with the Nikon D600 because it has so many features for about the same price. If you are leaning more towards sports photography, or you need an all-in-one solution, something that has flash, if you do a lot of video, that headphone jack is really nice. The one thing I didn't like about the D600 was having to exit live view to change my aperture, and I wasn't getting an exposure preview in the live view for photography. My understanding is that there's an update coming that will correct it, but as of this recording, it has not been released, and there's no solid confirmation of when it's coming. I think a true beginner, or an intermediate, would really appreciate the D600. The Canon 6D, I think, is going to be the ultimate companion to the 5D Mark 3. So if you're a wedding shooter, and you're looking for a backup camera, it is going to be perfect, simply because its low light performance is better. It focuses better in low light, it has less noise, I was really really impressed with it. I also think first-time full-frame camera owners are going to love the 6D for portraits. I really like the reds coming out of the camera, and if you are a videographer, you are going to definitely appreciate the high ISO noise, as well as the quick and easy way to operate the live view. I do think that's going to make a difference. In the end, I'm not seeing anything about either camera that disqualifies it from being able to produce awesome images. I think, you know, the user, the user's knowledge and ability is going to be what's making the big difference there. Any skilled pro, I don't think would have a problem with either camera. If you are a beginning or intermediate photographer, you definitely need to check out my crash course video on each of these cameras. The whole idea of making these crash course videos is to save you guys the time and frustration that I went through when I learned photography. It took me about two years to really learn the camera, and I've reduced that learning curve to about three and a half hours. All my videos come with a 100% money-back guarantee, so there's no risk to you, and you can order them from the following link.