Photography News issue 21

22

Camera test

ISO performance With more than 50 megapixels crammed into a 35mm frame, you might expect the EOS 5DS to suffer badly from noise. And it’s true that the colour blotches and loss of fine detail at ISO 6400 and the expanded 12,800 don’t look great, but overall the 5DS does really well in this shot taken at early twilight. The base exposure for ISO 100 was 0.5sec at f/8 using the EF 24-70mm f/2.8 II.

ISO400

ISO800

For critical results, ISO 1600 is perfectly useable and while you can see noise, the effect is acceptable even viewed at 100% on screen. The JPEG shot at the same ISO without any in-camera NR was even smoother than the Raw at the cost of fine detail resolution. These Raw files were processed in Lightroom CC with no noise reduction or extra sharpening.

ISO3200

ISO 1600

FULL FRAME

ISO6400

ISO 12,800

FULL FRAME

High ISO noise reduction

Shoot in JPEG and Raw and you have three options for High ISO Noise Reduction, low, standard and high. Set JPEG only and you have Multi-shot NR where the camera takes four shots consecutively and then merges them into one for, in theory, a better result. The camera is offline for around 12 seconds as this process takes place. No surprise that the Raw is the best in terms of detail and this image sympathetically processed will be the best. Of the JPEGs, I think the low setting of the in-camera high ISO NR works well, with the standard and high settings affecting detail too much for my tastes. The multi-shot option is worth trying – with static subjects, of course. For our test, we tried the in-camera NR feature at ISO settings of 1600, 3200, 6400 and the extended 12,800 equivalent. We’ve shown the results at the top native ISO here.

RAW6400

6400HIGH ISONROFF

6400HIGH ISONR LOW

6400HIGH ISONR STD

6400HIGH ISONRHIGH

6400HIGH ISONRMSHOT

Photography News | Issue 21

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