acr 5.6 gets less moire (this MAY make it improve IQ for cameras other than 7D as well, haven\'t checked yet)
it might be a touch less microcontrasty at times than 5.5, but those are pretty rare times, so maybe they did have to do a little averaging away of the finest detail contrast here and there, however it doesn\'t appear to be something to worry about since it is almost always minor and while DPR didn\'t post their 50D RAW file to compare with and the way they set ACR doesn\'t dig into the finest details too well, it still seems, looking at their samples, pretty likely that the 7D even with whatever they had to do with 5.6 will still at the very least the 50D for detail in any case so whether acr 5.6 needs to average away a little at times doesn\'t appear likely to matter any in the end if it has more reach than any other camera on the market even as is and of course it has far less banding at high iso than a 50D and so on
with acr 5.6 i think that pretty much any 7D copy (even the more out of balance ones) will be able to give overall better results than any other aps-c on the market at any iso for any purpose; maybe i am overstating things in the other direction now, but probably not
personally i lthink ACR 5.6 output from the 7D is the best since even if you had a copy that had no mazing at all with DPP and C1 those two still leave those nasty speckles and a few other artifacts all over and ACR 5.6 does not (i\'m not a c1 expert so maybe if you fiddle around enough you can eventually get them to go away without ruining detail but not so sure about that). DPP also has a lot more zipper artifacts (as it does wth any body nothing to do with the 7D just the way they programmed the demosaic algo) and is more prone to breaking moire up into weird patterns.
anyway im happy since i dont really like using DPP very much regardless of how well or not it does and i think i like acr handling a little better than c1 too plus who wants to spend another ton of money on yet another program
Nov 19, 2009 at 01:34 PM
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