uz2work Offline Upload & Sell: Off
|
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.
Les Zigurski
|