I shot these images with the help of friend and "resident pro" Gibbs Frazeur, using professional studio strobe packs and a standard portrait lighting setup. (Two soft boxes in front of Marti, a background light and a hair light high above to the rear.) We used each camera's strobe white balance setting.

Here again, I shot with each manufacturer's ~100mm macro lens, very sharp optics. (Canon 100mm f/2.8, Nikon 105mm f/2.8) While we didn't have the identical lens on both cameras, I think it's pretty fair to say that the performance of the Canon and Nikon optics we used would be pretty closely equivalent, particularly stopped down as much as we had them. We tried to get the scale as close as possible between the two cameras, and once again were within 5%. (Marti fills just slightly more of the frame in the 14n shot than in the 1Ds one.) We also tried to stay as close as possible with the aperture, but for the sake of simplicity bracketed with the lens aperture, rather than trying to vary the output of the studio strobe packs. (Besides being extraordinarily tedious, varying the strobe output would have led to a high probability of the light balance between the various strobe heads not matching from one shot to the next.) As it turned out, the best exposures with each camera were at f/13.

The JPEG images linked here are straight from the camera in the case of the EOS-1Ds, and extracted from the DCR files via Photo Desk in the case of the Pro 14n.

Once again, I was surprised by how differently the two cameras rendered the color. Overall, I preferred the "look" of the 14n, although in truth it was a little on the reddish side, while the 1Ds came out a bit greenish overall. Detail was fairly similar between the two, but as you can see below, the 14n tends to lose detail in areas of relatively flat contrast.

BTW, The smaller size of Marti's eye here is a combination of the ~5% tighter framing in the 14n's shot, and the somewhat smaller pixels in the 1Ds...

1Ds scaled and unsharp masked

This shot has the 14n's image scaled upward by about 16%. - 10% to account for the difference in sensor area between the two cameras, and another 5% on top of that (1.10 * 1.05 =~ 1.16) to adjust for the slight scale factor difference between the two photos.

(Full-sized image with this processing not on the server.)

The 14n pretty clearly wins this particular comparison, but there's the issue of that 5% difference in scale factor between the two shots. Still I think fair to say that the 14n holds an edge in fine detail in this example.

The crops above show roughly the same areas of Marti's hair, shot with the two cameras. At far left is an example from the 14n, with its default noise reduction and image sharpening settings in force.

The center sample shows the same image (extracted from the same RAW file), with the noise reduction turned off entirely, and the image sharpened in Photoshop. Even though the NR is turned off entirely in the software, it's evident that some level of noise-reduction processing is still going on, as there are still clearly areas in which the individual strands of hair are "smooshed" together.

The crop on the far right is from the EOS-1Ds, sharpened in Photoshop. Note how cleanly the individual strands of hair are delineated, even in areas where there's very little contrast separating them. Note too, the lack of any graininess or jaggies in the strands of hair, due to the 1Ds' anti-alias filter. (Although it must be pointed out that the individual strands of hair that are visible in the 14n examples are somewhat more finely rendered.)

These examples show the 1Ds as having a markedly superior ability to preserve fine detail in areas of low contrast.

Using the anti-moire noise-reduction option in Photo Desk helps the situation somewhat, but the blotches still remain, and there's some loss of sharpness as well. By comparison, the EOS-1Ds shows no moire at all, and even does a somewhat better job (to my eye at least) of preserving the shape and texture of the threads in the cloth.