Very pertinent is the fact that both John Sheehy and Gabor ("Panopeeper") are on record as saying that the 7D is the lowest-noise APS-C camera ever - and by an easily observable, Real World margin.
I have to agree to the "lowest noise on an APS-C sensor sofar". It does indeed look very good... Unfortunately Canon has done the same thing as with the 5D2 and the 50D and diluted the green channel colour filter to the point where it gets really hard to do a colour-accurate profile of the camera. This does however give them almost twice as much light in to the green channel as compared to Sony/Nikon - and hence almost one half-stop less noise in the green. And a very different colour-noise signature.
Read-noise integral is lower per picture width than the 50D, by a good margin. It seems that total light efficiency is also up, by almost 5% - which actually is a lot. FWC is also up a bit per mm2. These facts are also very good for good-light shooting... :-)
Unfortunately the colour filter weakness means that my favourite raw-converter doesn't work that well with the 7D, at least not at higher ISO's. These are all LR2.5-conversions of ISO3200 examples from ImagingResource.com. I've applied some colour noise reduction to the Canon's but even more would not reduce colour accuracy or detail by any noticable margin. Custom profiles has been made for all cameras to roughly equal colour separation between cameras - and this does not work in the Canon's advantage.
All pictures downsampled to 12MP size, which doesn't matter much at ISO3200 in a crop camera, there isn't much more (factual, real) detail available in the full 18MP file.
brainiac:
If it hurts anything, resolution hurts latitude. If you were complaining about losing half a stop of latitude due to the 7D's high resolution, I could understand it
Could you tell me what you think about 7D and 5D (mkI) comparison?
It seems to me that 5D should be still better in dynamic range at high ISO and it should have better color sensitivity.
I didn't see it that way at all, until someone mentioned it. The mention itself introduced a negative mood that wasn't here before.
The discussion about noise performance relative to other cameras is legitimate, relevant and interesting to many. Comments like the one above, and the follow-ups (including this post, unfortunately), is what degrades the thread.
google translate did a good enough job to get the gist - the guy really liked tha camera. The 1600 sample is excellent to 50% after sharpening, and the 4000 ISO of the guy's face is pretty usable (albeit soft) at 25%.
alundeb wrote:
I didn't see it that way at all, until someone mentioned it. The mention itself introduced a negative mood that wasn't here before.
The discussion about noise performance relative to other cameras is legitimate, relevant and interesting to many. Comments like the one above, and the follow-ups (including this post, unfortunately), is what degrades the thread.
abqnmusa:
this thread has turned into another my camera vs. your camera argument
Well, some people (like me) want to know how this camera compares with other Canon DSLRs. I do not care about new features (with the exception of 100% viewfinder) but I desperately want to know if it is worth getting this camera for its S/N.
I do not want to get it next week (I am on a pre-order list) and be forced to sell it (losing my taxes etc)
mfurman wrote:
Could you tell me what you think about 7D and 5D (mkI) comparison?
It seems to me that 5D should be still better in dynamic range at high ISO and it should have better color sensitivity.
Haven't shot with a 7D. Yet. It certainly looks like a great camera from all of the samples and crops I have seen. I do use a 500D as a third camera (my Papa's), and I think it's really excellent - probably a better low light camera than the 50D, so I see no reason why the 7D should not have caught up with the 5D, either in terms of low-light/noise-floor/banding or in terms of dynamic range. We shall see. Frankly, even if the 7D only images as well as a 500D it will still probably be a terrific camera.
