Just picked up a D7100 yesterday and realized: “wait, this 2x crop mode is 15mp?  My GX1 is a 2x crop and about 15mp @2:3.  LET’S COMPARE!

So, I did:

D7100 w/Nikon 35mm/f2

GX1 w/Nikon 35mm/f2

The results aren’t exactly surprising.  They have pretty close to the same pixels covering the same area.  The base ISO of the GX1 is slightly higher, so shutter is slightly different, but: tripod, so who cares?  The D7100 is also slightly taller, so framing is a little off between the two, but I think you can still get the idea from what’s here.  In short, any differences are up to sloppy technique.

It’s too bad that the the crop mode on the D7100 is wonky for video (scaling issues appear to be resulting in low quality video in crop).  If Nikon figures out a fix for that, I’ll be back with a video comparison.  (Scaling wise, I can’t see why they couldn’t, since the GX1 is scaling a very similar amount of pixels to make 1080 video.)

For now, this tells me…well, nothing I couldn’t already guess.  But idle curiosity got the better of me and I had to try it.  Now you know, so you don’t have to waste time trying yourself.  (click the above images for original, unscaled versions).

P.S. for those too lazy to check the EXIF, this was at f4.