Jeff Kingston wrote:
I say this with a degree of caution. One large house claims they received a large shipment yesterday and will start shipping today. I guess I am confused since some seem to have received information that the cameras were not shipping from Canon for another few days (albeit other sources said cameras were shipping from Canon yesterday). My bottom line: I'll see if mine ships today as promised
This sounds like a story I saw on DPR concerning Tiger Direct which turned out to be bum info from Tiger Direct.
theSuede wrote:
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.
Hmm. On my monitor:
- the D700 is the cleanest
- the 5DII is a close second
- the 7D and the D5000 are a tie for third place; maybe slight advantage for the D5000 (or maybe it's just slightly softer, so the noise is not so gritty-looking?)
jorkata wrote:
Hmm. On my monitor:
- the D700 is the cleanest
- the 5DII is a close second
- the 7D and the D5000 are a tie for third place; maybe slight advantage for the D5000 (or maybe it's just slightly softer, so the noise is not so gritty-looking?)
Am I missing something
Looks like that to me too. D700 is super clean and has all the detail as well, so it's not smearing as some would claim.
Pixel Perfect wrote:
Looks like that to me too. D700 is super clean and has all the detail as well, so it's not smearing as some would claim.
Ignore the D700 as an outlier for a moment.
Take a look at the D5000 sample closely. Notice what is happening with the luminance noise? It is very clumpy and the edges are quite broken up. Most of the Nikon bodies I've tried seem to exhibit this at some ISO, so it may be that Nikon is "cooking" the RAW data in some way. I think what theSuede is sugesting in saying he'd rather work on the 7D file is that once the luminance channel begins breaking up like this it becomes harder to clean up the files using NR; there are too many residual artifacts.
I agree the D700 sample looks very good at this ISO setting. If you shoot the 5D2 and don't need a big file, I've found that sRAW1 seems a bit better than full RAW downsampled, and while I've not done a detailed comparison, my impression is that it is very close to the D3/D700. This leads me to wonder how the 7D MRAW will look...
Pixel Perfect wrote:
Looks like that to me too. D700 is super clean and has all the detail as well, so it's not smearing as some would claim.
The extent of Nikon in-camera RAW cooking varies from sensor to sensor.
The D3X is totally uncooked (the DR curve is a smooth straight line). Very impressive output: much higher DR at low ISO than any Canon counterpart and relatively low noise at high ISO.
The D5000 is badly cooked with kinks all over the place in its DR curve. The broken object edges and mottled look of uniform surfaces lend support to this.
jorkata wrote:
Hmm. On my monitor:
- the D700 is the cleanest
- the 5DII is a close second
- the 7D and the D5000 are a tie for third place; maybe slight advantage for the D5000 (or maybe it's just slightly softer, so the noise is not so gritty-looking?)
Am I missing something
What's "missing", is other APS-C cameras in the comparison. If they were included, that would give the 7D a higher "rank". AFAIK, the D5000 is the lowest noise APS-C cam currently available, and is therefore most relevant to compare with. If the 7D matches the noise level of the D5000, but with a more fine-grained, natural looking noise, that is good, and in line with other comparisons.
garyvot wrote:
Take a look at the D5000 sample closely. Notice what is happening with the luminance noise? It is very clumpy and the edges are quite broken up. Most of the Nikon bodies I've tried seem to exhibit this at some ISO, so it may be that Nikon is "cooking" the RAW data in some way.
Nikon IS cooking the RAW data. Not only the D5000, but the D90 too. And probably other crop cams as well.
I agree the D700 sample looks very good at this ISO setting. If you shoot the 5D2 and don't need a big file, I've found that sRAW1 seems a bit better than full RAW downsampled, [...]
I agree that the 5D2 sRAW1 files look pretty good. It also seems that Canon cooks it with some kind of NR applied, because the sRAW1 data is cleaner than when downsizing a 21MP to sRAW1 size. The negatives of sRAW1 are decreased sharpness (when compared to a downsized full RAW file) and they fall apart quickly in PP (highlights, colors).
Will the new SanDisk Extreme Pro 90MB/s CF cards help the speed of the 7D at all? Or are we looking at future cameras only being able to take advantage?
