Friday, February 12, 2010

Canon 5D Mark II ISO Settings and Noise



The other day photographer and friend, Axel Cipollini, sent me this link. It's an interesting study, but I'm not going to get in to the details of it. In a nutshell this is what you should take from it. You should be shooting at 50, 160, 320, 640, 1250, 2500 ISO, etc. For some reason at 1/3 stop under the full stops of 200, 400, 800, 1600 you get considerably less noise than at any other similar ISO settings. Interesting.

Grazia Axel!

5 comments:

ser said...

strange. according to the chart i'm better off shooting at 160 rather than 100. does that only account for 5d2? do you reckon it would be the same on other APS cameras as well?

Charlie Mahoney said...

Hey Ser. If you take a look at the supporting link you'll see that the study was only on the Canon 5D Mark II so I doubt it necesarilly applies to all cameras. That being said, I imagine that it would apply to cameras that use the same or a similar sensor.

If anyone wants to do their own analysis, I'd be happy to publish your results here.

Stephen said...

I have just done a noise and dynamic range test on my 5D Mk II and found that both the noise and dynamic range is better at ISO 160 than ISO 100

Shawn Anthony Fraser said...

Interesting.
But this graph states that ISO 1250 has lower noise than ISO 125. That can't be right. Can it?

Pat said...

I ask the Conon Support for that. They told me: "excuse me sir, this is a secret by the mother company Canon Japan" ... really interesting that.