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I just picked up my new EOS 50D today, and wanted to see how the low-light/high-iso performance of it was, compared to my 400D. I upgraded to the 50D because I was expecting it to be a much better low-light performer. I shoot a lot of dancy-photography, which usually happens indoors in lousy lighting conditions, so I was hoping the 50D would be a massive improvement.

The following will be a small review of the Canon EOS 50D, focusing on the low-light performance. If you want to get a more technical or extensive review of the 50D, the following sites might be interesting to you:

• DPR’s pre-view and forum
• Roland Lim’s thorough use-oriented review, and comparison with 40D and D3.

For my own little test, I setup some items in a dark room, lit only by a single table-lamp. Don’t be fooled by the brightness of the pictures - to achieve that at ISO 100, a shutter speed of 2-3 seconds was needed. Seeing how the 50D would perform in this kind of setting was exactly what I wanted to know.

Test of ISO 100 to 12800

Below are test shots of ISO’s 100 through 12800. The images were all downloaded with DPP, at its default settings, and exported to JPG. Click on the images to view the large versions.

ISO 100:

ISO 200:

ISO 400:

ISO 800:

ISO 1600:

ISO 3200:

ISO 6400:

ISO 12800:

As you can see, the 50D performs pretty well up to ISO 1600-3200, but above that, visible noise starts to kick in. In some quick low-light test I did this evening, noise at ISO 3200 is a bit more apparent than in the sample shots above, but 1600 seems perfectly usable. Noise is most visible in the dark areas of the picture.

Cropped photos

Below I’ve compared images shot with the 50D with images shot with the 400D. Because of the higher resolution of the 50D, I have downsized the jpg’s in the second column to match those of the 400D native-resolution jpegs, to make it easy to compare. The third column contains the actual 100% crop of the 50D samples.

100 ISO, 400D, 100%	100 ISO, 50D, downsized	100 ISO, 50D, 100%
200 ISO, 400D, 100%	200 ISO, 50D, downsized	200 ISO, 50D, 100%
400 ISO, 400D, 100%	400 ISO, 50D, downsized	400 ISO, 50D, 100%
800 ISO, 400D, 100%	800 ISO, 50D, downsized	800 ISO, 50D, 100%
1600 ISO, 400D, 100%	1600 ISO, 50D, downsized	1600 ISO, 50D, 100%
	3200 ISO, 50D, downsized	3200 ISO, 50D, 100%
	6400 ISO, 50D, downsized	6400 ISO, 50D, 100%
	12800 ISO, 50D, downsized	12800 ISO, 50D, 100%

From these shots, you can see that the 50D clearly outperforms the 400D.

The 400D is fine up to about ISO 400, but at 800 visible noise starts to kick in, and at 1600 it’s too much for anything but an emergency shot. This is also my experience from using the camera.

The 50D, on the other hand, seems to have no visible noise up to around 1600 ISO, with ISO 3200 being usable, although with a little noise and loss of detail.

Conclusion

Compared to the 400D, which could only shoot good quality pictures up to 400 ISO, the 50D can shoot good quality pictures at 1600 ISO, and OK quality at 3200 ISO. That is 2-3 stops in light sensitivity, and means that a shot with the 400D that needed a 1/10 second exposure, can now be shot with a 1/40 or 1/80 second exposure.

For me, that can easily mean the difference between sufficiently freezing dancers in motion, or a big blurry blob where your subject was supposed to be, and I’m eager to test the camera more in real-life situations, to see if the “lab-tests” prove to be the same as results in the field.

Anyway, I hope you have found this useful, if you’re considering upgrading from the xxxD to the 50D.

Tags: 50d, Photography

This entry was posted on Friday, October 10th, 2008 at 23:08 and is filed under Photography. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.