Friday, October 16, 2009

5D mkII and 7D comparison

test composite-sm
A couple of test shots comparing the 5D mkII and the 7D. Shot a glass decanter at 6400 in a dimly lit room, 125th @ f/2.8. They were both shot in RAW and converted to jpg in lightroom with no adjustments. I resized to fit the blog. Sharpness doesn’t seem to be a factor on the 7D as I’ve been hearing, but I think the 7D appears brighter and a little less flat too. I’ve noticed this on my last wedding shoot where the 7D colors really popped. The interesting thing is, the red color on the wall here is closer to reality on the 7D than the 5D mkII.

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Keith - September 27, 2010 - 6:08 am

I’m a 5d user of 4 years and at the cusp of upgrading. At first I thought the MKII was the only camera worth upgrading to and then the 7d hit the shelves. A mate of mine has one and he comes directly from a film based Leica. His opinion is that the 7d with the best EFS lenses produce stunning images equal to what he has been used to with film. I have sweated buckets trying to make up my mind which one to go for and I think the MKII is winning the race. Why? Full frame delivers better image quality and anyone in denial over that is deluding themselves. Crop sensor files need to be enlarged to almost twice that of FF files to achieve the same print size for a start, and then there is the question of noise to consider. In fairness to both formats it is impossible to get a scientific comparison between the two cameras. They are both different. Both have their pros and cons and both have their uses for different genres. If you need a camera for sports, wildlife, or photo journalism, then the 7d is probably as good as it gets at the moment. If you want a camera to do fine art, or landscape photography then the 5dMKII is the best in its price range.

I’m still stuck up a gum tree over which one I will purchase, but both are worthy of anyone’s attention that’s for sure.

Daniel Valente - March 25, 2010 - 9:48 am

Cool test. I agree the 7d does look better. Lots of vignetting on the 5d Mk II. What lens was used? I had a 5d Mk II but returned it because it was corrupting raw files shot in a burst. I replaced it with the 7d. The 7d + 85mm f/1.8 is a low-light champ! I’ve been really happy with ISO 2000 and lower and ISO 3200 is totally useable. The 5d Mk II I had also banded at base ISO, which the 7d doesn’t had.

In my perfect world, the 7d would have used the 1.3 x 10 megapixel sensor from the 1d Mk III + Dual Digic 4s. Wow that would be a sweet camera…

Anyways I did some equally non-scientific but informative test on the 5d Mk II and came up with the same result:
http://danielvalentephotography.com/2010/03/17/canon-5d-mk-ii-noise-in-low-iso-images/

And btw these aren’t inaccurate when I am shooting something I want to be able to set my ISO, shutter, AWB and aperture and take a shot. I’m not going to measure everything, mess around with lighting changes minute by minute etc. I want to know how a camera is going to before in the moment that I need to take the picture…

Noah ( San Francisco Wedding Photographer ) - November 19, 2009 - 9:36 pm

I just got a 7D, so I’ll be trying this combo out too. Nice to see that it has such good results at high ISO. I wasn’t expecting performance that good.

Zlatko - November 19, 2009 - 1:59 pm

Thanks very much for posting this. I appreciate the simple test. The differences are interesting, as are the similarities. I use the 5DII and it appears from this that the 7D is also a very capable high ISO camera. By the way, comparing them at f/16 wouldn’t be useful to me as I never shoot at f/16.

Craig Kohlruss - November 15, 2009 - 11:24 am

Hi William,

Thanks for adding your comment to my blog. This was never meant as a scientific trial of the two cameras but rather a simple test for people to use when considering which one they might like to look into further. I thought the 7D got a bum rap early on with its 1.6 crop sensor and those who insisted the quality of the image couldn’t be as good as the 5dmkII. I think this test shows it’s not all that bad. It might even be slightly better. But this test DOES NOT show that the 5dmkII is an inferior camera in my opinion. It just shows that the 7D isn’t either. I have both cameras and need both for different purposes. Using my 50mm f/1.4 for example would give me a much different image with the 7D than it does the 5DmkII. For me this test shows that I can use the 7D in low light with a tighter frame and a higher fps and not worry about the results. It’s not meant to discount the quality of the 5DmkII because that will still be my main portrait camera.

William Bray - November 15, 2009 - 1:56 am

Thanks for this test. I have posted a question on photo net http://photo.net/canon-eos-digital-camera-forum/00V0P4
and I said what I thought that I can’t see where the 5d camera as a whole is a brilliant deal when compared to the 7d.
A lot of people went mad, people who own a 5dMKII will never accept this.
There has been 2 pros who said to me if they could do it again the would choose the 7d over the 5d MKII and they’re not wildlife or sports photographers
Canon got the sensor right but everything else that makes a camera was rushed, I think they were frightened a lot of people would switch to nikon.
I love canon L lenses i’ve shot with canon for years and been happy but untill the 7d arrived I was feeling short changed by canon.

Steve Z - Denver Wedding Photographer - November 4, 2009 - 1:20 am

The results of this quick test doesn’t surprise me. The 5DM2 was a rushed answer to try and react to the D3/D700, and never really lived up to it’s potential. It will be interesting to see how the 1dm4 performs in real life after a shaky start!

Craig - November 1, 2009 - 7:10 pm

This is an unscientific test. Sorry if some of you were led to believe something different. I only wanted to do a quick shooting test with these two cameras and then look at the difference – for myself. I posted the results on my blog because I thought some of my friends would be interested.

Just for the record, they are not cropped at all and they were shot at the same settings. Because of the cropped sensor, I moved closer to the subject with the 5D Mark II, but there is no crop. They were shot at about the within a few minutes of each other.

Look at the test for what it is and make your own choices. Thanks for stopping by.

genotypewriter - November 1, 2009 - 4:23 pm

The main question is… what exactly are you trying to compare here? Is it the noise? The highlights? Detail? DOF?

A bit hard to say anything about noise from this test without more information:

* First of all… there’s a little thing called White Balance, people… you need to make them equal… just like we’d frame equally regardless of the size of the sensor, we’d set the WB equally too.

* Which brings us to the next thing… how were these shots framed? The noise seems to be massive, spatially… indicating that these are crops. How did you frame the subjects and how did you crop? These are fairly important things for a test.

Can’t really tell anything more without knowing the above… but one thing’s for certain… this is not a test for detail/resolution because the subject is the worst thing to judge that… reflective, transparent, with no flat surfaces and placed very close (at f/2.8!!)

GTW

Rob Ashton - November 1, 2009 - 3:40 am

Unfortunately the FF disiples will never accept that a crop camera may just do as good a job. The central part of this image (the decanter) is more punchy in the 7D shot and the new metering algorithms used will improve the reds in any image over the 5DII. The next generation 5D and 1D series will have this same metering which should level the field again.

Henry - November 1, 2009 - 1:54 am

stop defending the 5D mark II

the test was done in real world condition and the winner was the 7D

enough with controlled testing charts and whatever

R. Brown - October 31, 2009 - 7:44 pm

Inaccurate results from poor testing methods.

Shooting a full frame camera wide open @ f/2.8 has obviously yielded a significant amount of vignetting from the lens. That’s why the full frame sample looks so uneven compared the cropped sensor sample — it’s between 1 to 3 stops darker in certain sections of that image. The 7D has good exposure throughout, whereas the 5D looks severely underexposed.

Another factor that this “test” was done with unpredictable window light. I know from experience that the amount of light coming from the window is very erratic — at times, it can change on a minute-to-minute basis as clouds move across the sky. That may help explain why your 5D test samples are exposed so dark compared to the 7D sample.

These are the reasons why your test is so inaccurate. Much of the 5D background is almost completely black, whereas the 7D background is almost evenly red. Next time, try to keep the lighting and lens conditions identical. There is a good reason why proper test shots are best done indoors under controlled artificial lighting. Your haphazard test is inaccurate at best, misleading at worst.