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

High ISO Performance

After shooting in the dark workshop rooms, I moved on to shooting in the main hall. In previous O'Reilly conferences this year, I've shot at ISO 1600 in the main hall. However, because of better lighting at Web 2.0, I was able to turn down to ISO 1000 and get higher shutter speeds to boot. Here's an exposure taken at 1/250 of a second at f/3.5 with a 70-200mm lens at 165mm.

Now, here's the 100 percent actual pixel detail:

Once again, this is the equivalent of looking at a 5' print made from this image. The noise qualities for ISO 1000 are excellent. In the crop above, there's enough detail to where you don't notice the noise at all. To take a look at the noise, here's a 100 percent crop from the edge of the couch on the left side of the frame:

At this level of performance, ISO 1000 is an eminently reasonable option for indoor shooting. Here's another example from later in the conference as I continued to get used to what the camera allowed me to do in low light conditions:

And, here's a 100 percent detail view right to show the sharpness, detail, and noise qualities of the capture:

When I saw the above detail in this shot, I just stopped in my tracks and admired it for a while.