Canon 50D - High ISO - JPGs

High ISO examination.

Seems simple enough, no?

No... actually it isn't...

If it were just a smaller shift in resolutoin like the change from the 30D to the 40D - it would have been easier; just shoot matching sets of shots and review... easy.

With the increase to 15.1 MP, (a jump of 50% in sensor resolution) there enters a larger degree of difficulty. Some sites have up-converted 40D images to the 50D size then cropped... This doesn't make sense to me as you will now distort the 40D image. Others have down-converted the 50D image down to the 40D resolution and then they crop, but again - you may lose detail and hide (or magnify) issues w/ the 50D issue...

For this first pass (and, the more I think about it, the other passes too) I'm going to leave the images posted at their orig resolution, so the 50D images (consistently on the bottom of the paired images) will appear slightly magnified. Just seemed this was the best route.

Okay - that aside - the setup I used was to put a random selection of itmes onto a wooden trivet propped up on my kitchen counter. I put a cap to the left and matched the angle of the trivet to match the angle of the front of the cap so there would be little DoF issues between focus on the cap stitching and the coins/trivet.  I setup my tripod and camera to shoot as square as I could to this, zoomed in to 105mm on my EF 24-105 f4L IS lens, and set both cameras at Manual, f5.6, and then adjusted ISO and shutter speed per image. I left my battery grip w/ L-bracket mounted in the tripod and swapped out bodies and lenses. A "photodisc" was used to set custom white balance for both cameras and I used live view (w/ manual focus) to focus, and a remote trigger to avoid camera shake. The cameras were set to save both .jpg and RAW files. This post only shows the JPGs. Picture style was set to "Standard" (essentially neutral w/ 3 for sharpening) on both cameras, and all noise reduction were set to off (not the default - this had me turn off the 50D default of "standard" in the "High ISO speed noise reduction" setting). To avoid unwanted tweaking - I avoided Lightroom and stuck with PhotoShop, and all images are saved out as JPG at 100 quality.

Here is an image of the setup:

Different items for dark texture (the cap and the piece of charcoal colored cardboard), fine detail (the grain in the wood), and shiny metal as that seems to be difficult to get.  I had thought to show examples from many areas, but practicality drove me to find one area that seemed to have a bit of each so I settled on this: (40D at top - 50D below):

With that as a benchmark, here are the comparison images between matching ISOs. So 1600 and 3200 are no big deal - each is a valid setting on both cameras (tho you are really pushing the ISO on the 40D to get 3200 - thus the (H) in the LCD when you use it), but with 6400 and 12,800 (H1 and H2 on the 50D) there is no similar setting. Since those don't exist, I've left the 3200 ISO image in for comparison:

 

If figured that you may also want to see each camera's test images next to each other:

40D 1600 and 3200(H):

50D 1600 - 12,800 (H2):

This brings a close to the jpg portion of our program... More postings as I've the chance to get the RAW files through DPP.

Thanks for reading!

Comments

[Tom]

Do this simple test and you will look at ACR quite differently. Take a raw file shot at ISO 12800 and convert it with ACR (no adjustments) and then use the Canon utility to convert the file (just make sure you turn off the noise reduction in the Canon preferences). The Canon software will give you an astonishingly cleaner image than the Adobe ACR. I was shocked by the difference.

[WillShootPhotos]

What you've seen doesn't suprise me. Primarily because Canon would know the camera, the sensor, and all the specifics of the engineering behind the sensor - which should give them a head start on their RAW process. Adobe has only the RAW files to work with.

I'll be sure to give that a try.

Thanks for the comment!

- Will