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

John Sheehy wrote:

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?

You missed the important word “not” in my (now purple) post above. When NOT maxxing out the crop.

See, we’ve both actually been in agreement.  

R2