Canon 5D: First Impressions
Pages: 1, 2, 3, 4

Ultra-High ISO Performance

Unfortunately, I wasn't able to take the 5D out into the field and spend all day shooting at ISO 100 and with prime lenses. Instead, I headed indoors into dark conference rooms. Rooms that I've been shooting at ISO 1600 with my 20D and have been barely getting by with 1/120 of a second exposures at f/2.8. There's always the "H" setting on the 20D, ISO 3200 in other words, but the images it makes are so grainy that they require a lot of work and are still only barely usable.

However, I had seen impressive comments about the high-speed sensitivity of the 5D, so in a dark room I cranked it up to ISO 3200 and fired away. Here's an example that was shot at 1/200 of a second at f/2.5 with a 135mm lens:

Of course, that's a smooth 500-pixel-wide reduction from the full image. Obviously, this is more than acceptable for web use, but let's look deeper. Here's a 100 percent pixel crop across the eyes:

While very noticeable, the noise is still acceptable. It's also, to my eyes, very reminiscent of film grain. At 100 percent, you can see a bit of blockiness—but keep in mind that we're looking at a 5' image. Let's back out a bit to the equivalent of a 2 1/2' print:

This is simply amazing performance. It's been a while since I've worked with ISO 1000 negatives or ISO 400 chrome, and I haven't had time to do a direct comparison, but to my eye this performance is at least in the same ballpark. And yet, this is shooting two to three stops faster.

There is something else that I should note: while I never saw an extreme case of banding in the noise of the 20D at ISO 1600 that some people saw, there were many shots where I noticed it to some degree. The 5D has, for the most part, eliminated this issue, even at ISO 3200. I was able to find some noise banding in my captures, but only when really tweaking out the images to the point where the image was unusable with the Levels or Curves tools in Photoshop.