7D ISO Comparisons

A couple of people asked for ISO samples from the 7D post last week, so here they are. These shots are straight out of the camera with NO post processing except for changing the file size to meet NPN requirements.

First shot ISO 200

ISO 400

ISO 800

ISO 1600

ISO 3200....So, what do you think?

Kinda hard for me to see any huge degrading between the first and last. It's there but certainly not horrible...cool!

So, what do you think?

I think you're obviously lying. Admit it, you shot all of these at 200iso, didn't you, Kurt?

Man, does this bode well for future camera releases, esp. a full-frame camera, or what?!

I had the 50D before this and I felt like I couldn't use anything over ISO 400. I am extremely happy :)

Ditto what Todd said. Thanks so much for this post, Kurt.

Impressive ! Looks as if you can just set the ISO to 1600 and forget about it.

These do look nice, but I think it's hard to tell unless you did a side-by-side comparison between this and another camera. A night shot or low-light shot, in particular, would show the noise more. A shot in daylight at high ISOs will look pretty good at web sizes with almost any camera. Here's a comparison I found on the web:

http://www.the-digital-picture.com/reviews/Canon-EOS-7D-Digital-SLR-Camera-Review.aspx

The 7D does look good considering how many pixels they packed into it. It appears better than the 50D but not by a huge margain and the full-frame 5DII is certainly better. So for the price, I'd say it looks quite good but it's not an enormous leap forward.

Grant, I understand your point, but wondering what you mean by "the 5DII is certainly better"? It might be better at capturing low noise images at low light, but for many of us, that is not the primary definition of a better camera. For instance, if I am doing sports phtography or wildlife, I would take the 7D over the 5DII every time (which is why I purchased it over the 5dII). It is much faster, has better auto focus for moving subjects and allows me to get closer without needing to move closer with the APS-C sensor. I had and used my 50D every single week and can tell you from personal experieince, this is a major step over the 50D. I also read many reviews, but have seen it first hand. Thanks for you comments and I hope you don't think I am discounting them, but I just don't agree you can decide the 5DII is a much better camera because it does a few things better and a few things worse.

With that being said, I didn't post this to compare it to the 5DII and I don't think Canon put it out as a replacement for that cemera. I think they aimed this at competing with the Nikon D300 and I think they have acheived that.

Kurt, I just meant that the 5D II is better in terms of noise at high ISOs and that's what all my comments refer to. I didn't mean it's better overall and didn't mean the 7D isn't a major step up overall from the 50D. As you said, that certainly depends on what your intended use of the camera is. I haven't read up enough on the 7D to have a strong opinion on it, but it certainly seems like a very nice camera.

Kurt, how did the noise go after you did some pp, especially Curves?

btw, I'm not saying these photos needed any Curves. I'm just wondering how the noise was affected.

I have a 5D II, and when I hit a photo above iso 500 with Curves, the noise appears every time..

That looks like the results that I am getting out of my D700 at iso 3200. They look great! It is nice to finally have usable images at 3200.