For those of you that think the 7D is good with noise...

FlyingPhotog wrote in post #12596427
Regarding DPP Vs LR...

As a CPS Staff member once told me: "We gave Adobe some information but we didn't give them all the information. Our Files .. Our Software."

Which would make them complete idiots. A little bit like shooting yourself in the foot really. Not sure why you would want your gear to appear to be poorer to users of the most popular image editing apps out there. Completely illogical.

Spacemunkie wrote in post #12596606
Which would make them complete idiots. A little bit like shooting yourself in the foot really. Not sure why you would want your gear to appear to be poorer to users of the most popular image editing apps out there. Completely illogical.

They may have proprietary info in the raw they don't want to divulge to the competition, who knows?

They gave away enough info for folks to be able to process the raws to the point they seem happy with it. It is only when you do comparisons between ACR, or LR to the output of DPP where you may find those differences. Maybe many people just don't know how to fully utilize these other tools or change settings to get the most out of the raw, but DPP has this built into it to make it easier on the user. Hard to say. Software is an interesting market.

Spacemunkie wrote in post #12596606
Which would make them complete idiots. A little bit like shooting yourself in the foot really. Not sure why you would want your gear to appear to be poorer to users of the most popular image editing apps out there. Completely illogical.

It is poorer, not simply appears poorer, imo Canon has spent some R&D cash on software work-around's to minimise this Achilles heal in their sensors, and maybe didn't want to give this tech away for free, especially when it could also benefit a competitors images as well, and I'm guessing Adobe didn't fancy licencing/paying for it either.

Tbh I'm not sure why Canon have not resolved these cross-hatching and banding issue's in hardware yet, the only reason I can think of, is their condensed MP sensor architecture is harder to work around, or maybe there is a patent in their way?

pjl wrote in post #12590739
The 7D is noisier than the 5D II. Well, the 7D has a pixel size of 4.3 micron and the 5D II, 6.4 micron - so where's the surprise?

There is no general correlation between pixel density and image noise. The main reason that the 5D2 gives less noise in many situations is that the 5D2 sensor is 2.56x as large, and collects 2.56x as much light.

All Canon DSLRs have more noise than they should, due to pure sloppiness in sensor readout. Any Canon P&S with a Sony sensor has far less line/burlap noise than the DSLRs; they are inferior only because of sensor *size*. The 1/2.3" 10MP Sony sensor with 1.7 micron pixels used in many compact cameras and superzooms for the last couple of years has lower noise, per unit of sensor area, than any Canon DSLR, at any ISO, except that the 1D4 is close at high ISOs, only. The fact that there would be weak or no anti-aliasing in a 1.3x sensor full of 1.7 micron pixels means that such a sensor would be clearly superior to the 1D4, per unit of sensor area, at high ISOs.

Only one such camera, the D3s, has lower high ISO noise per unit of sensor area than 1.7 micron compact sensors; it has much higher noise per unit of sensor area at base ISO (less DR per unit of sensor area).

The only way in which the 40D is superior is that it is relatively lacking in vertical banding at low ISOs, compared to the 7D. This has nothing to do with pixel size, and is due to sloppy readout, and poor calibration of line-based blackpoints in the 7D.

rhys216 wrote in post #12596653
It is poorer, not simply appears poorer

In your opinion.

rhys216 wrote in post #12590883
^^^
TBH, I think allot of the problem about noise, is not just how much there is necessarily, but also how it's been rendered...

The variables in noise that have nothing to do with the camera or ISO setting are tremendous:

1) Relative exposure level.

2) Subject color (WB extrapolates some colors more than others, and exaggerates their chroma noise).

3) Lighting color - Most digital cameras do best with magenta-colored light; their "white". The worst common lighting colors are tungsten and green foliage-filtered light, where the blue and red channels (respectively) are actually 4x the ISO as the green channel, which is the one the camera targets. At low ISOs, this means far more read noise in these channel than if the ISO were 4x as high, because ISO 400, for example, has only 1.2x as much read noise as ISO 100, not 4x as you might expect, with Canon DSLRs. Shooting in tungsten lighting at ISO 100, brings photon noise in the blue channel to ISO 400 levels, but electronic read noise ISO levels into the many thousands.

4) Higher density cameras temp people to zoom further into the image on the screen, whereas they would stop with the lower density camera before the pixels got big, and soft (or pixelated, depending on the resize method). Higher magnification means higher visibility of noise.

5) You can't sharpen a turd. If you didn't get an optically sharp capture, you are going to get lots of noise if you try to sharpen it too much at the pixel level. Eat your humble pie, accept the fact that you won't get a poster from it, and make the image small before any sharpening. If you have a method to sharpen only areas that are in focus, and not the bokeh, that will help a lot to keep noise low.

6) Don't sharpen at full-resolution, if you're going to downsize. All this does is increase noise in the output, with no extra detail to speak of.


Far too many people make judgments without equalizing all these things. Someone with a noisier new camera may simply have forgotten to lower the JPEG sharpening level in the new camera, or enabled HTP in the new camera and forgot about it, or they may be shooting different things in different light.

Quote:
Originally Posted by FlyingPhotog

Regarding DPP Vs LR...

As a CPS Staff member once told me: "We gave Adobe some information but we didn't give them all the information. Our Files .. Our Software."

Quote:
Originally Posted by Spacemunkie

Which would make them complete idiots. A little bit like shooting yourself in the foot really. Not sure why you would want your gear to appear to be poorer to users of the most popular image editing apps out there. Completely illogical.

You might say Canon shoots themself in the foot
or better to say they bend the truth to protect their now decreasing markets.
They say ... "We gave Adobe some information but we didn't give them all the information. Our Files .. Our Software ..." because they are total pissed how Adobe is so sucessful and makes tons of $$$ on images from their Canon cameras.
They bend truth and contradict on several other things also ...

"They say there are limits how small pixels should get ...
but 7D is below current limit of good hearty light gather/noise ratio".

"They say they dont need mirrorless SLR cameras ...
but the concept prototypes are all mirrorless".

"They said FFDSL is the best way to go ...
but now say long Canon glass is too expensive and you need APS-C".

"They said you need to hold your camera like a monopod for sharp images ...
but now say you need to replace their IS lenes with their IS 2".

These widespread and reheased falseholds are somewhat normal for any company
who is experiencing reduced markets to say when times get hard.
They are not the complete idiots ... they know they sell to incomplete idiots.

I have both the 7D and the 5D MKii, yes the 7D is much more noiser than the 5D MKii. Canon has made the noise of the 7D mimic the grain you'd see with 'FILM'. For the photographers who remeber shooting film, if you remember sitting in the dark room w/ your eye to the loupe focusing the enlarger you'll realize that the grain of TRI-X 400 looks like the noise of the 7D at iso 3200. I think this goes to show that we've become lazy and dont print out a fraction of what we shoot and we're pixel peeping our images at 100% on a monitor (todays equivilant to putting our eye to the loupe). Print out some of those 7D high iso images and you'll have more respect for what the 7D can do.....my 2 cents

TeamSpeed wrote in post #12591473
Better noise reduction algorithms in the firmware contribute heavily to this, presumably just as much as the switchover to gapless microlenses on the hardware side. We can see major improvments in LR1 to LR3, for example, and software is cheaper to change than hardware.

So-called "NR hardware" is not really NR, in the same sense that LR or Topaz DeNoise reduce noise. It is actually noise prevention; reducing only in the sense of having less than previous models.

From a pure RAW perspective, where I measure everything, noise is generally getting lower, as densities get higher. Any technology, like that used in the D3s' sensor to get low high-ISO noise with large pixels only helps at high ISOs, doing nothing for DR at low ISOs, and if history repeats itself, there will be much smaller pixels with less high-ISO read noise per unit of sensor area around the bend. Sony's recent 1.7 micron compact sensors are not far behind.

Tadaaa wrote in post #12591946
Basically modern sensors have less intrinsic noise, but by having larger pixels/sensels you are now increasing the signal as well; this of course means a better signal to noise ratio and better quality photos. This is why the 5DII performs so much better than the 7D.

The 5D2 is worse with banding than the 7D, in low ISO shadows, and at the highest ISOs in shadows and midtones. When it *is* better, it is better mainly because of 2.56x the sensor area; not pixel size, and using more of the focal plane of a lens doesn't hurt, either. A Sony 1/2.3" 1.7 micron sensor has less noise per unit of sensor area than the 5D2, at all ISOs.

FlyingPhotog wrote in post #12596427
Regarding DPP Vs LR...

As a CPS Staff member once told me: "We gave Adobe some information but we didn't give them all the information. Our Files .. Our Software."

This is sad. It seems like a little kid who wants to take his ball and go home because he wasn't picked first.

Canon does not sell DPP. They make no money from it. If they had a brain in their head they would want every software program to make their cameras look as good as possible, and would share whatever information was necessary to make that happen. If what you were told is true, then the folks at Canon are about as stupid as a sack of hammers.

Edit: I see Spacemunkie beat me to this.

jase1125 wrote in post #12596885
In your opinion.

And anyone else's, if they are not visually impaired.

EL_PIC wrote in post #12596902
You might say Canon shoots themself in the foot
or better to say they bend the truth to protect their now decreasing markets.
They say ... "We gave Adobe some information but we didn't give them all the information. Our Files .. Our Software ..." because they are total pissed how Adobe is so sucessful and makes tons of $$$ on images from their Canon cameras.
They bend truth and contradict on several other things also ...

"They say there are limits how small pixels should get ...
but 7D is below current limit of good hearty light gather/noise ratio".

"They say they dont need mirrorless SLR cameras ...
but the concept prototypes are all mirrorless".

"They said FFDSL is the best way to go ...
but now say long Canon glass is too expensive and you need APS-C".

"They said you need to hold your camera like a monopod for sharp images ...
but now say you need to replace their IS lenes with their IS 2".

These widespread and reheased falseholds are somewhat normal for any company
who is experiencing reduced markets to say when times get hard.
They are not the complete idiots ... they know they sell to incomplete idiots.

Impressive, I see you got your eyes open!

EL_PIC wrote in post #12596902
They are not the complete idiots ... they know they sell to incomplete idiots.

You must have a lot of Canon equipment

^^^
An you'l be one soon!