rsg_1 wrote:
In the above example, it looks like the 7D suffers from a little more chroma noise than the D5000.
As I said, that's partly the fault of my raw-conversion as made by Adobe. When calibrated to give the same colour-separation as the D5000, the 7D "breaks up" a little bit earlier, but it's still a very tight noise that's easy to remedy (at least when downsampled to 12MP, I wouldn't care to much about using the full 18MP at ISO3200...). In the full-size picture that I linked you can see that the Nikon has more "coarse-grained" noise, and that it is also more "blotchy" for lack of more accurate words. I'd much rather work with the 7D file.
When processed "to the best of my abilities", the 7D gives BOTH better detail and less noise than the D5000 at ISO3200, and that is high praise in my book. The 50D was way worse for sure.
I'm a Nikon guy (but dual user), and the 7D is the first Canon in a while that's actually raised my interest.