Hi all,
I thought I'd do some further testing to toture both the K20D and the EOS 7D at higher ISOs in response to some wild speculations that higher ISO on the 7D was rubbish. This is not a K20D bashing - it's an older and significantly cheaper body than the 7D, so I would expect the 7D to perform a lot better. The test was similar to before with the following consistencies:
- Use the same lens for both bodies, the Sigma 10-20mm EX DC f/4-f/5.6
- Both lenses set to 20mm
- Manual mode
- f/8
- ISO 1600 and ISO 6400
- Tripod mounted
- Mirror lockup
- Manual focus in live view, although both camera's autofocus systems confirmed focus
- White balance set to tungsten
- NO other tweaks, corrections or changes made in Adobe Camera Raw or photoshop other than converting colour profile to sRGB for web presentation
- NO camera noise reduction
- Noise Reduction and sharpening applied in Noise Ninja, auto profiled with Colour and Luminance set to 0, sharpening set to 120% and 1.2 radius.
- Both cameras set to RAW to bypass JPEG engine
- Adobe Camera Raw v5.6 for RAW to TIFF conversion
From my own experience with the K20D, ISO 1600 from RAW shots had very acceptable noise indeed and tests at the time showed it was just as good as its peers (50D and D300). Things got a bit out of control upwards of 1600, but here are some simple images at 1600 and 6400 ISO from both my bodies to demonstrate the noise levels that I get from both. Again, these are not scientific tests, just simple images and solid facts.
Here are the 100% crops:
K20D ISO 1600:
EOS 7D ISO 1600:
K20D ISO 6400:
EOS 7D ISO 6400:
Without a shadow of a doubt, the 7D retains more detail at higher ISOs although the actual level of chroma noise isn't that much improved with the 7D. The 7D may benefit from increased noise reduction whilst retaining as much detail, but that's purely down to how you choose to do your post processing.
May I remind you that given the price of the two bodies, this is the result I would expect. The K20D is still superb given it's age and cost, that's why I've kept it
.