R5+100-500+1.4x or R7+100-500?

R2D2 wrote:

John Sheehy wrote:

R2D2 wrote:

John Sheehy wrote:

I subscribe to this assessment, esp when birding.

However I've noticed that whenever I'm not maxxing out the crop, the R5 clearly pulls ahead of the R7 in the IQ department.

If the R7's entire frame has less noise than a 1.6x crop from the R5, then any smaller sensor area used by both will also have the same ranking. Noise per unit of sensor area does not vary with sensor area.

I'm not talking about a smaller sensor area, but a larger one, and filling up a larger one.

That isn't what you wrote, at least not clearly.  What you wrote, in gold text above, is that you're maxing out the R7 frame and comparing it to the R5, and you find the R5 to have less noise, but you didn't state anything that would change other than the camera, and the context was "focal length limited", so the only way I can read it is that you meant that the R5, in crop mode, and AOTBE, has less noise than the R7.  That is demonstrably false; every exposure-controlled comparison shows that the R7 has about 1/2 stop less visible read noise in the shadows of high ISOs.  If you're talking about the fact that you get less noise when you fill the R5 frame than the R7 frame with the same exposure and ISO, then of course that's true, but that is really about different photo-ops, isn't it?

The R7's advantage exists only in a very narrow set of usage cases (and that's only considering IQ, and not the other performance factors). In short, the R5 is clearly turning out to be the better wildlife/birding body for me (now that I've gotten to shoot the R7 more). YMMV

Or my mileage may be your kilometerage.

There's another illusion that I didn't mention, because it does not involve exact comparisons of usage. There is also the confounder effect of which camera you use for which job; if you shoot the R5 whenever you can fill the frame well, but shoot the R7 when you are more focal-length-limited, then most of your R7 images will be of smaller and/or distant subjects, which will tend to be noisier for reasons that have nothing to do with sensor efficiency with noise.

Same kind of thing with TCs; people will use the TC more often when the subject is smaller and/or more distant, and blame the TC, when all the TC did was add a slight amount of aberration. Distance and small subjects are a PITA for IQ, and I don't think that we need to blame that on the tools that we use to make the most of them.

The farther away the subject is, and the smaller it is, the faster the shutter speed we need, and the less light from the subject we get with the same shutter speed and pupil size.

The only way the R7 forces more noise on you is if your lens is too long, and there is no TC to take off, so you have to back away from the subject because of the narrower angle of view.

You may call the entirety of my experience (with both cameras) an illusion, but "that's why they play the game."

I only suggested that you could have come to the conclusion that the R5 in crop mode has less noise than the R7 without anything that could prove it.  If you were talking about using the entire R5 sensor, then you should have said so.  This is a focal-length-limited thread.