The Canon 5d has been my favorite digital SLR camera body since the first time I shot with it and saw the beauty of the files. The quality reminded me of when I shot medium format and was just amazing. As newer cameras continue to come out I always test them against the 5d to see how they stack up to my trusty camera body. Here is a quick review of the Canon 5d vs the Canon 7d.

One of the main things that I wanted to test out with the 7d was its handling of noise at high ISO’s and compare it to a 5d (not a mark 2 just a regular 5d)

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Overall the 5d files look better as I expected with the full frame sensor, but the 7d did hold up pretty well. It really isn’t until 3200 that the 7d starts to get noisy and from here the image quality starts going down fairly quick. If you have a good exposure and fix the noise in post production then 3200 and even 6400 can be very usable from the 7d though (or can make a great Black and White conversion with a film grain look). ISO 12800 in my opinion isn’t really usable at all though, very noisy and blotchy in the shadow areas. Also on the 7d I did have the High ISO noise reduction turn on to standard.

For this test I had a well lit subject (window light coming in from the left of the frame) and shot all of these images with the same settings:
White Balance: Daylight
Exposure Program: Aperture Priority
Shutter Speed: 1/60 sec for the ISO 400 shot, 1/125 for the ISO 800 shot, 1/250 for the ISO 1600 shot and 1/500 for the ISO 3200 shot
F-Stop: f/4.0
lens: Canon L 28-70 f/2.8L
set to 35.00mm

Nothing was done to these images other than opening them up in lightroom and converting to jpeg (no adjustments were made to the images though). Then I cropped them to 100% so you can see a detail of the image and sized to 600×400.

Here is the 5d at ISO 400

The 7d at ISO 400

5d @ ISO 800

7d @ ISO 800

5d @ ISO 1600

7d @ ISO 1600

5d @ ISO 3200

7d @ ISO 3200

7d @ ISO 6400

7d @ ISO 12800

Since I had to size these down to 600×400 to be viewable on the website here are a couple of close up crop comparisons. The 5d image is on the left and the 7d image on the right.

shot at 1600

shot at 3200

Overall the Canon 7d holds up pretty well at higher ISO’s, and compared to the older 30d and 40d’s that I have used there is a definite improvement. I don’t have a lot of experience with the 50d Canon camera so can’t say if there is any improvement over that at all but the 7d does well vs the 5d. Next up will be to review the 7d vs the 5d mark2 and see how it can hold up against that body.

Update: View more samples reviewing the Canon 5d and Canon 7d here (canon 7d high ISO tests)

If you are looking to get a 7d, Amazon has great prices on them: Canon EOS 7D

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