The whole \"banding problem\" is way, way overdone in photography forums. The usual pattern is that someone brings it up, a few passionate participants rattle on about it, some number of photographers who use the camera point out that it virtually never affects actual photographs, the \"passionate participants\" become indignant and share (highly post processed) \"example\" files, names are called, those who think the whole brouhaha is quite silly give up and go away...
I shoot extensively with the 5D2. I frequently push the dynamic range of the camera and I often have to lift shadows by any of several means in post. On occasion, when I\'m doing post-processing work and staring very closely at the 100% magnification images on the screen, I too can locate what sometimes appears to be a faint banding effect in the normal noise.
This has turned out to be an actual problem in a real photograph - e.g. a large print - exactly zero times in my work.
I write this fully aware that the noise-banding enthusiasts are quite likely to jump all over me for this. Been there, done that, and I\'m not about to engage in a lengthy forum battle over this. But when it comes to actually making photographs, as opposed to pixel peeping and fretting over anything that is less than God\'s Own Divine Camera Perfection, this is pretty much a complete non issue.
One additional point on the 5D v. 5D2 image quality issue. I have tens of thousands of image files from both cameras. I cannot ever tell which type of file I am opening just by looking at the \"image quality\" - in every case, unless I know by the date of the shot, I have to look at the image dimensions in my raw convertor to tell which camera was used. And in the end, I can produce equally good prints from files from either camera, with the exception of the effect of having more pixels to work with when the source file came from the 5D2. In the latter case, if everything was done with care at the time the shot was made, I can likely produce a somewhat larger print.
Dan
Jun 03, 2011 at 04:42 PM
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