OP
Tiny Tim
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Regular Member
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Posts: 229
Re: 30D is the cleanest...
XeroJay
wrote:
...and by quite a margin. The 30D @3200 looks better than the 50D
@1600! And no one can use the "you have to down-size" excuse for the
50D on this one...
Any conclusions of yourown?
I haven't picked through the images in detail yet but my very quick impression is that all the cameras are remarkably good, even up to 3200 ISO. Beyond that perhaps things get a little shakey but none of these images has had any fine tuning for noise or sharpness so I suspect there is room to achieve better results with some effort or after market NR software.
Viewing the original raw files at "fit to screen" sizing in Lightroom (17" 1920 X 1200 display viewed from 18") the noise is completely inoffensive - barely visible - up to and including 1600 ISO, from any of the cameras at any format of (s)raw. It starts to become clearly visible at 3200 ISO but, once again, barely detracts from the image. A pixel peeping tog may spot the noise but your average bride and groom would be oblivious to the "problem", in my opinion. Going beyond 3200 does take noise to a whole new level, and one which I'd prefer to avoid.
At 6400 ISO I'd say the sRaw1 images look neatest, with least banding and finest noise grain, even when all three formats are resized to "fit to screen".
At 12800 ISO there is a visible diffeerence between sRaw1 and sRaw2 but I am undecided which is the more pleasing. Full size raw just looks horrible, with a significant amount of chroma noise. I'm not sure what part the ACR algorithms play in these differences and what part the camera's own performance plays but on this evidence I would not want to shoot 12800 ISO to full size raw.
By the way, if anyone wants to judge sharpness I focused using Live View with the 40D and 50D on the right hand black eye of the snowman thingy (the eye that is on the left in the picture). For the 30D I'm afraid focus was impossible to determine precisely while shooting so there are no guarantees there. At 85mm and f/3.5 and a subject distance of around 7' (estimate) the DOF is only 3", which does not cover the whole scene from front to back and, of course, will not bare scrutiny at 100% magnification.