"Who is DxO Labs? How legitimate are its image quality measurements? What is DxO Analyzer?"

The general public sees and makes use of Image Quality Evaluation (or IQE, as we call it at DxO Labs) mostly through consumer tests, camera benchmarks, and various technical reviews performed and published by very reliable photography magazines and experts. This is the data on which most photographers rely when it comes to buying a new camera or optics.

However, as you can certainly imagine, Image Quality Evaluation is also a mission-critical step for manufacturers when it comes to developing new cameras: manufacturers’ imaging scientists and engineers need IQE to improve their prototypes generation after generation, to evaluate and source the best sensors, and to calibrate and tune the embedded image processing, etc. Of course, such IQE must be done exclusively at a RAW image level, since most of the time the camera doesn’t exist yet!

Most of you may know DxO Labs as the creator of DxO Optics Pro, our PC and Mac solution for demanding photographers. What you may not know is that our core business activity is serving the imaging industry by licensing to large manufacturers innovative image processing technologies, primarily at chip level.

DxO Labs is also recognized throughout the imaging industry as the leader in image quality measurement for professional applications, thanks to its DxO Analyzer solution . DxO Analyzer is a turn-key image quality measurement laboratory used by companies such as Nikon, Kodak, Fujifilm, Panasonic, Olympus, Samsung, as well as by NASA and numerous other entities. DxO Labs is also a very active member in imaging industry professional associations: for example, DxO Labs is the technical editor for the CPIQ group, an initiative of the Imaging Industry Association (I3A) to standardize image quality evaluation. DxO Labs also participates in many scientific and engineering conferences on imaging and has published a number of papers related to IQE topics.

So we are a serious player when it comes to measuring image quality.

A complete DxO Analyzer solution for measuring RAW images costs several thousands of dollars and requires a certain level of expertise. Further, a huge amount of time is needed to perform all the relevant RAW image quality measurements, which is why this kind of data was not available for the imaging community, not even for the photography press, until now. Only large manufacturers had access to such data in their own private development centers.

What we have done with dxomark.com is to simply publish this information for free for a very large audience – and especially for photography journalists so that they can integrate these results as a part of and a complement to their own camera analyses and reviews.

"What exactly do you measure? What do you DON’T measure?"

First, what we DON’T measure: We insist on the point that we DO NOT pretend to measure the overall quality of a given camera, nor is it our intention to replace formal camera reviews. Within its current scope, dxomark.com does not measure the quality of either the optics or the image processing, nor do we address “camera control” (sometimes called “3A” for Auto Exposure, Auto-Focus, and Auto White Balance). And of course, we give no opinion on ergonomics, value for money, design etc.

What we DO is focus intensively on the sensor itself: we measure the quality of this subsystem, and of this subsystem only. So if you are shooting in JPEG, these measurements and ratings might be of limited interest for you, since the RAW image will be processed by your camera’s embedded image processing chip. However, if you shoot in RAW, dxomark’s metrics will be critically important to you, since they will indicate the maximum image quality you can reach with optimal RAW conversion.

So please take dxomark.com for what it is: an original and complementary approach to existing camera reviews, focusing only on RAW image quality.