Monday, January 11, 2010

7D fubar?

And after getting excited about the 7D the other shoe has now formally dropped. It's pretty clear that much of that extra pixellage is wasted with a strong aliasing filter. This is well-illustrated by looking at the DIII/DIV/7D/5D2 comparison down the page at:

http://www.the-digital-picture.com/Reviews/Canon-EOS-1D-Mark-IV-Digital-SLR-Camera-Review.aspx

Which shows that the 7D is far noisier, and quite a bit softer than the 5D Mark II (unless you ramp up the sharpening, presumably). The 1DIV looks like it might be a little noisier than the 5D2, and perhaps not quite as much raw sharpness, but the results are close.

The results are in line with Darwin Wigget's review of the 7D so there's no reason to think they are erroneous.

Since the tests are done at the same focal length, the sharpness of the characters is a good match for the intrinsic sharpness feather detail would be in the final image. The 7D falls short by a decent margin, especially over the 5D2. The only upside to this is that the high cost of the 1D IV looks a little better if I don't buy the 7D as well - there's no point me getting a camera that has substantially worse image performance than my current one.

I'm also interested in what/if Canon will announce for the 1Ds IV. Although $8K-ish is a lot of money for an SLR, compared to $5K-ish for an SLR that isn't as sharp as the one I even own (1D4) it would look rather more compelling if it did resolve more than my 5D2.

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