Arne Hvaring posted the following commentary and photos in a discussion which took place today in the GetDPI forums. We were discussing Michael Reichmann's G10-P6000 comparison on The Luminous Landscape (mentioned earlier today on the blog):

Here are a few things MR didn't tell you :)

The DPP RAW conversion of G10 files introduces significant and sometimes rather bizarre artefacts. In default mode it also seems to sharpen the image to such an extent that any further sharpening looks overdone. MR uses "another RAW converter" which might be better, but officially DPP is the only game in town at the moment. The files of P6000 converted in ACR looks rather soft in comparison, but have much less demosaicing artefacts. The Nikon files can be PP significantly and sharpened a lot before becoming ugly.

Below you'll see the full image, then 100% crops first from G10, then P6000. The crop is taken quite a bit from the edge of the picture and yet also the sharpness degradation (actually in the form of doubling of contours) of the Canon lens can be seen. But mainly the crops show the curious mess DPP/G10 makes of the green bush. The P6000 file is sharpened moderately and looks to me more natural and 3-dimensional.

The next two crops (Canon first) are from a more central part of the same image. While the Canon shows slightly more fine-detail resolution, it comes at a price. The diagonals (white wooden boards a.o.) have rather rough stair pixelling, and the tiles show much the same. The Nikon is more well behaved and looks smoother and more natural. The good news for G10 users is that most of these artifacts are not really visible in print, even up to A3+.

I find it curious that MR didn't notice the loss of sharpness in the outer zone of the Canon lens. Like Amin I noticed it immediately in the images posted in Photography Blog, and I have confirmed it in my own testing. In fairness it should be mentioned that the softness is significantly less at the longer focal lenghts. The Nikon lens is more conservatively specified, both in regard to zoom range (4x vs. 5x) and in speed and it shows. It draws nicely and evenly over the full imaging area.

Finally, let's not make too much of this, first of all we are comparing only two cameras, sample variation might throw this off completely. Secondly, even as it stands, both are state of the art small sensor cameras capable of excellent output.

Which one did I keep? By a small margin the P6000 (main reason: on the whole a better lens and smaller/lighter camera), but with better optical performance than my copy showed, it might just as well have been the G10.