7D test images taken today (high ISO)

[inTempus]

My buddy brought over his 7D for me to play with today.

It's an amazing body. It's very well built and the fit and feel of it surpasses that of a 50D. The view finder and LCD overlay are superb and it left me really wanting to go buy one. The AF system is very nicely done, the controls are intuitive and simple to use. It's a VAST improvement over the 50D IMHO from top to bottom.

Here are some test images I shot in my studio. I shot from a tripod using a 17-55mm f/2.8 IS lens. The aperture was set to f/8 (Av mode) and I adjusted the ISO from 100 to 12800. I let the camera decide the shutter speed. I set the white balance to tungsten.

Images were shot in RAW and processed in DPP, exported as JPG's. No noise reduction was done to them and no other edits of any time were done. These are straight out of camera with the exception of the last two images at the bottom of this post.

ISO 100:

ISO 400:

ISO 800:

ISO 1600:

ISO 3200:

ISO 6400:

Now, here's a heavy crop of the ISO 100 image to show how sharp the image is. I opened these in DPP (shot in RAW) and exported them with default settings.

ISO 100 No sharpening:

ISO 100 Sharpened 80% in CS3:

I was humbled by the high ISO performance actually. It's very impressive for an 18mp crop body. I'll let you guys be the judge, so what do you think?

 

[Cojaro]

Color noise aside, I don't see very much degradation in sharpness or image quality until ISO 3200. Even then it's still pretty good. ISO 6400 looks a little too grainy to be used on more than an as-needed basis.

I'm curious what the image quality is like in a low light situation, especially ISO 800-6400.

 

[cfusionpm]

These images are clearly fake. There is no way the high pixel density of the 7D will allow any kind of usable pictures at high ISO. 18MP is just absurd for a 1.6 crop sensor. Everyone knows that!

 

[inTempus]

Color noise aside, I don't see very much degradation in sharpness or image quality until ISO 3200. Even then it's still pretty good. ISO 6400 looks a little too grainy to be used on more than an as-needed basis.

I'm curious what the image quality is like in a low light situation, especially ISO 800-6400.

These were shot in pretty low light. The ISO 100 shot had a 1/2 second shutter time and the ISO 6400 had a 1/125 shutter time.

I disagree about the ISO 6400 shot. I think it's perfectly usable, especially if you do a little noise reduction on it. It would print beautifully.

 

[Cojaro]

Color noise aside, I don't see very much degradation in sharpness or image quality until ISO 3200. Even then it's still pretty good. ISO 6400 looks a little too grainy to be used on more than an as-needed basis.

I'm curious what the image quality is like in a low light situation, especially ISO 800-6400.

These were shot in pretty low light. The ISO 100 shot had a 1/2 second shutter time and the ISO 6400 had a 1/125 shutter time.

I disagree about the ISO 6400 shot. I think it's perfectly usable, especially if you do a little noise reduction on it. It would print beautifully.

Well, yeah, some noise reduction on the ISO 6400 would fix things quite easily.

 

[NateWagner]

oh I would totally use the 6400 for lowlight at weddings and such. Very useable, and when converted to b&w not bad at all (and of course cleaned up in color it isn't bad either.

 

[jpeters]

Much better then I thought it would be. I was expecting worse color noise aswell

 

[rufus5150]

I did my first event shoot this last week with the 7D. I had to use almost exclusively ISO 1600 + and I was quite worried as my test shots had me a bit nervous. I was extremely happy with how the images came out, and even the NR in LR was able to handle the noise acceptably.

 

[MrLogic]

I'm curious what the image quality is like in a low light situation, especially ISO 800-6400.

Juzaphoto.com has some test images up... 100% crops. Scroll down to Image Quality: Noise & ISO:

Juza Nature Photography


edit: maybe not as "low light" as you had in mind. :-/

 

[inTempus]

I did my first event shoot this last week with the 7D. I had to use almost exclusively ISO 1600 + and I was quite worried as my test shots had me a bit nervous. I was extremely happy with how the images came out, and even the NR in LR was able to handle the noise acceptably.

You should export in Lightroom and DPP and compare the files side by side. I found that Lightroom looks horrible by comparison (7D files). DPP does a better job processing images, especially high ISO images.

Once Adobe gets their RAW converter sorted out for the 7D I'm sure this will improve.

 

[musicaleCA]

Color noise aside, I don't see very much degradation in sharpness or image quality until ISO 3200. Even then it's still pretty good. ISO 6400 looks a little too grainy to be used on more than an as-needed basis.

I'm curious what the image quality is like in a low light situation, especially ISO 800-6400.

You can see one shot that went in the student paper at UBC here. That was 6400, 1/30-60 (probably 30), and f/2.8. And even then I was underexposing by at least a full stop if not two. Even in that small photo, you can see the evidence of severe chroma and luma noise in the walls/paint.

If you're in a situation like this, a 1Ds and f/1.4 lens is the only thing that will save you, at least in terms of getting a commercially viable shot (in my opinion). (Also, at f/2.8 the AF system was having a LOT of trouble locking on; enough for me to switch to MF, and hope I got close—it was too dark to see clearly.)

All that to say that there IS a limit and at some point you'll be fighting to get anything usable. But that limit is really up there. That is the one time that the 7D wasn't up to the task for me, and it's definitely a rarity. They were literally playing in near-pitch-black.

 

[rufus5150]

I did my first event shoot this last week with the 7D. I had to use almost exclusively ISO 1600 + and I was quite worried as my test shots had me a bit nervous. I was extremely happy with how the images came out, and even the NR in LR was able to handle the noise acceptably.

You should export in Lightroom and DPP and compare the files side by side. I found that Lightroom looks horrible by comparison (7D files). DPP does a better job processing images, especially high ISO images.

Once Adobe gets their RAW converter sorted out for the 7D I'm sure this will improve.

I did that for HOURS the first few days and didn't see enough of a difference to inconvenience myself with DPP.

The images were really quite clean from the latter shoot, though.

 

[inTempus]

Here are some images from the 5D Mark II. I may go back and reprocess the 7D images to make them larger so you can see more details.

ISO 100:

ISO 1600:

ISO 3200:

ISO 6400:

ISO 100 No Sharpening Crop:

ISO 100 80% Sharpening Crop:

 

[RyanLilly]

These are very usable, Here The ISO 6400 shot, With a mild application of noise reduction done with Noiseware. The texture of the monkey's face is very difficult to preserve with out masking it from the noise reduction, so I went light on the luminance noise reduction. However with the default setting everything else in the photo looked near perfect, but the monkey's face was noticeably smoother.

 

[inTempus]

I would say the 5D Mark II images are much sharper out of camera.

But you're right, the NR on the image looks great. Totally usable.