Canon 760D Hands On Review Pt. 2 – (Botched) ISO Comparison with 550D

*Apologies first*

1st. Sorry to everyone who read the first part of my review of the Canon 760D and was waiting to see how the 760D sensor would perform, no matter how much I botched the comparison. I wanted to continue with the series sooner, but got caught with finishing my final exams (last ever!!) and the subsequent post-exam travelling. I’m back now!

2nd. As stated in the title, I botched this comparison, due to a combination of reasons such as lack of foresight (sigh*) and bad memory (sigh*). It is common sense that an ISO test requires the exposure between test cameras to be identical to remove any difference stemming from aperture and shutter speed settings. However, in my excitement to test the new cameras, I totally forgot about this. I relied on Aperture Priority to automatically adjust my settings while I played with ISO instead of using Manual Mode to adjust the exposure. While this would usually not cause too much of an issue if the light remained fairly constant, such as with an indoor venue like the LCE Proshow this was done at, I had also totally forgot that I normally set my camera to meter using Centre-Weight metering, as opposed to Canon’s default of Evaluative metering that heavily biases the metering the focus point. As a result, there is an entire stop of difference between the exposures of both cameras. Any professional reviewer would scrap the whole thing and redo it. However as newbie who no longer has access to the camera, I will attribute this to amateur mistakes and *ahemshamelesslyahem* post this comparison, with the promise the IT WILL NOT HAPPEN AGAIN.

*Apologies ended*

Jumping straight into the ISO comparison between the 760D and 550D. Similar comparison with the 750D can be made as it uses an identical sensor to the 760D. Only RAW files are explored here, as JPEG ISO performance is largely determine by the image processing and noise reduction algorithms and not the real sensor performance. As explained before, there is some exposure difference between the two cameras. The 550D pictures turned out about 1-stop darker. However, it is still possible to compare the ISO performance by comparing areas of similar darkness. Please open the images in a new tab to view their full sizes.

By looking at the comparisons, it is hard to see any obvious improvements in the ISO performance between the two cameras. This very disappointing as it has been 5 years since the introduction of the 550D, and others rivals have made strides in this area. I deduce there is, at most, 1/3 stop improvement when comparing areas of equal darkness. The biggest improvement is at ISO 12800, where there is no magenta colour cast in the 760D. Nevertheless, that is comparing extended ISO of the 550D and the native ISO of the 760D/750D, and so is not a valid comparison. Based on this, I can say that improvements in noise performance is negligible, and is bad news.

One weakness of Canon’s sensors is with dynamic range, particularly in the shadows. Traditionally, when raising exposure in post with Canon files, the shadow would display much more noise and banding than sensors of other brands such as Nikon and Sony. This gave much less flexibility in post processing with Canon files, particularly when an exposure error has been made. We will look at the dynamic range performance of the new 760D sensor here. As before, please the open image in a new tab to view its full size.

The two images were taken in RAW at ISO 100 where there is the least amount of noise, and the exposures raised by 3-stops using Adobe Lightroom 5 (please excuse the wrong label for the 550D image). The performance of the two sensors are very similar. However, we can see that the 760D images shows less magenta noise in the darkest regions, and has no banding. The 550D images shows a fair amount of vertical and horizontal banding. So some improvements have been made, but noise levels are still high, and no match to Nikon or Sony sensors.

Conclusion

All in all, we can say that Canon has made some improvements in their sensor technology. After all, a 6 megapixel increase in resolution, from 18MP to 24MP, has resulted in little or no image degradation, or a little improvement (adding megapixels is usually at the detriment of noise performance and dynamic range). However, rivals such as Nikon and Sony have been using 24MP sensors for a few years now, with generally have much better performance in all areas. Canon has been behind the curve for a few years now, and they do not seem to have caught up at all. For Canon users and fans like me, this is not good news at all.