I shot these last night at Birdland here in NYC...i usually use my markIII but I wanted to see how the 50D performed....1600 ISO...no noise reduction ,no sharpening applied...what do you think?
most of them are pretty noisy with the horizontal or vertical (in the portrait oriented images) banding in the black background.
By using the default ACR noise reduction (25% color) you could make that look a lot better.
It also looks like the images are less sharp at 1600, but that could also be due to the limited depth of field. Because the 85L looks a lot sharper at low iso settings, even without any sharpening.
I'd say it doesn't look a lot (if any) better than my 20d did with these settings/lenses.
What do you think?
I am posting the pictures for those interested in the ACR 4.6 issues spoken of...I am not making a judgment just showing the pictures...from my perspective the noise level looks similar to my old 40D although I will say for sure that focus was quicker and better with the 50D....I do look forward to the ACR being upgraded from Beta to see if things improve a bit more..in general I find the camera very fast to focus and very accurate in most of my testing thus far...the LCD is a godsend as well!
jonbrach wrote:
I shot these last night at Birdland here in NYC...i usually use my markIII but I wanted to see how the 5D performed....1600 ISO...no noise reduction ,no sharpening applied...what do you think?
I did some city skyline shots at iso 1600 last night, and the sky showed similar amounts of banding patterns even in DPP. I could make it go away if I overexposed the city lights but that kinda ruined the shot. I appears the 50D is really sensitive to underexposure. I'll try ISO 1250 tonight and see if that's better. ISO 1250 was significantly cleaner on the 40D compared to 1600.
I tried my 50D for the first time today at ISO 3200, and I was not impressed with the results. Banding was evident on many of the shots. The rest suffered from loss of detail and rather unpleasant noise. I tried converting the RAW files with both DPP and ACR 4.6. At 100%, the DPP conversions may have been a bit cleaner, but the difference was not significant. My early assessment is that ISO 3200 might be ok with noise reduction for subjects without fine detail, but, for animals, birds, or other subjects with fine detail., the fur, feather detail, etc. is lost to a greater degree than I'd like.
When I tried a few ISO 1600 shots, they were significantly better than the 3200 shots, but still not as good as my 1DIII at ISO 3200. Performance at 1600 and 3200 appears to be pretty close to what it was in the 40D, which is to say that it is not something I'd want to rely upon on a regular basis.
For my uses, this isn't a major problem because my uses won't often call for ISO 1600 or 3200, and for the rare situations when I need to go to 1600 or 3200, I do have the 1DIII. It may well be that Canon would have been better able to use the gapless microlens technology by making the 50D sensor a 12 mp sensor and genuinely improving performance at higher ISO, but it is also my guess that they will sell more 15 mp 50Ds than they would have sold a camera with 12 mp.
ward1066 wrote:
did you adjust exposure in ACR any?
I can't tell you what the OP did, but, in my case, at both 1600 and 3200, I tried pushing the exposure to the right quite a bit, and I still wasn't impressed by the results.
I shoot music with a Mk3 and I think 3200 on my Mk3 looks at least as clean as these. Still, impressive for that much resolution on that size sensor. It looks at least as good as my 40D, if not better. About to be expected, Canon always makes improvements but nothing revolutionary.
I'm getting confused. I see this banding and noise on some other posts also and yet see great clean shots at high ISO on the Wildlife and other boards/sites, albeit in brighter conditions.
Guess I should just stick to the 40D and wait on the 60D
I did install the new 4.6 and played around with it a few shots at 1600 and 3200..it looks a bit better...for the most part it appears to be about the same as my 40D was or perhaps a bit better,certainly not the 1-1/2 stops better promised...that said the 50D is a far better camera even if the noise is essentially the same in my opinion....i also agree that my markIII is dramatically better in terms of noise but then it is dramtically more expensive as well
Exif says 50D 
