# Review: Sensor Performance of the 7D Mark II



## Canon Rumors Guy (Dec 1, 2014)

```
<p>Roger Clark has done a very extensive and technical review of the sensor performance of the Canon EOS 7D Mark II and how it relates to the original 7D, astrophotography and general photography needs.</p>
<p>This review is well worth the read.</p>
<p><strong>From the review…

</strong><em>“The data shown here for the Canon 7D Mark II indicate that the camera is operating at near perfect levels for the sensor with lower apparent read noise and impressively low pattern noise compared to all other current Canon cameras tested and better than that in the 7D Mark I. This means that for high signals, noise is dominated by photon statistics. Sensitivity is improved 14% over the 7D Mark 1, and the sensitivity per square micron is the highest that I have measured for any Canon camera to date.</em></p>
<p><em>The approximately 10x lower thermal dark current is a <b>game changing</b> factor, making this camera the top Canon camera for long exposure low light photography that I have tested. The superb autofocus system, comparable to Canon 1D series pro cameras with 65 autofocus points is another <b>game changing</b> innovation, as the camera is at a price point that is affordable to more people.”</em></p>
<p><strong><a href="http://www.clarkvision.com/reviews/evaluation-canon-7dii/" target="_blank">Read the full review</a> | <strong><strong><strong>EOS 7D Mark II in stock $1799: <a href="http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1081808-REG/canon_9128b002_eos_7d_mark_ii.html/bi/2466/kbid/3296" target="_blank">B&H Photo</a> | <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00NEWZDRG/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B00NEWZDRG&linkCode=as2&tag=canorumo-20&linkId=4IHYPE3ZKJN5VL4X" target="_blank">Amazon</a></strong></strong></strong></strong></p>
<p><strong><span style="color: #ff0000;">c</span>r</strong></p>
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## TLN (Dec 1, 2014)

game changing, game changing, game changing, blah blah.. 

But show photos from 7d1 and 7d2 to people, and they' won't recognize what camera is where.

What is really game changing, sony A7 or a7s. Or new 5-axis sensor stabilization in A7 II. Btw it cost as much as 7d2.


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## fragilesi (Dec 1, 2014)

TLN said:


> game changing, game changing, game changing, blah blah..
> 
> But show photos from 7d1 and 7d2 to people, and they' won't recognize what camera is where.
> 
> What is really game changing, sony A7 or a7s. Or new 5-axis sensor stabilization in A7 II. Btw it cost as much as 7d2.



Sounds like they will for the type of photography he mentions that they would . . .

And show them the poorly focused action shot the Sony missed versus the one the Canon got and then I suspect anyone would notice the difference.

Why can't people take balanced opinions? This isn't religion where there is at least an excuse for displaying huge bias.


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## Skywise (Dec 1, 2014)

> The approximately 10x lower thermal dark current is a game changing factor, making this camera the top Canon camera for long exposure low light photography that I have tested.



Better than an FF sensor like the 6D?


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## Don Haines (Dec 1, 2014)

TLN said:


> game changing, game changing, game changing, blah blah..
> 
> But show photos from 7d1 and 7d2 to people, and they' won't recognize what camera is where.
> 
> What is really game changing, sony A7 or a7s. Or new 5-axis sensor stabilization in A7 II. Btw it cost as much as 7d2.


5 axis stabilization is old news.... just ask anyone with an Olympus OMD camera... it's been out for about 3 years, and they had 3 axis internal stabilizers 12 years ago....


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## TLN (Dec 1, 2014)

Well, i can call game changer new technology, new features, something that never been done before.
7d2 in evolution of 7d. It is bwtter here and there, and we can expect it from canon. This is not a revolution of technology, so its hardly a gme changer.

But a7 is.
First ff mirrorles. Yep i know about leica, but its too exotic and pricey
A7r offers really nice sensor in a compact body
And a7s low light performance is incredible. In a light and small package. 
A7ii first ff ibis. 
And they can easily use canon lenses with af. You can call it a first step to universal lens mount if you want. 

Im not a sonynfanboy, just a general phot shooter and a7 looks very promising to me


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## TLN (Dec 1, 2014)

Don Haines said:


> TLN said:
> 
> 
> > game changing, game changing, game changing, blah blah..
> ...


5 axis full frame stabilization?


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## Don Haines (Dec 1, 2014)

Skywise said:


> > The approximately 10x lower thermal dark current is a game changing factor, making this camera the top Canon camera for long exposure low light photography that I have tested.
> 
> 
> 
> Better than an FF sensor like the 6D?



better per square micron....

The 6D has 2.5 times the number of square microns, so even if the 7D2 is 20 percent better per square micron, the 6D still generates twice the electrons.


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## dolina (Dec 1, 2014)

I never had any illusions that it will be outdo the ISO & dynamic range of a 1DX & 5D3. My expectation is it be better than the original 7D.

In all accounts I am impressed with the 7D2.


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## Don Haines (Dec 1, 2014)

TLN said:


> Don Haines said:
> 
> 
> > TLN said:
> ...



I think marketing departments are "full of it"

A 14 percent improvement in efficiency is evolutionary, not revolutionary.....
5 axis stabilization on crop to 5 axis stabilization of FF is evolutionary, not revolutionary....
increasing the number of focus points..... same thing.

Realistically, the last three revolutionary things to hit cameras were the digital sensor, live view displays, and DPAF. Despite the hype (and everyone is guilty), pretty much everything else has been evolutionary.


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## TLN (Dec 1, 2014)

Don Haines said:


> TLN said:
> 
> 
> > Don Haines said:
> ...


Well, youre right but full frame stabilisation and small flange distance seems interestin:
Does any system offer stabilized 35/1.4 on full frame? Stabilized 24/1.4? Nope. Stabilized ... Well you got the point. Fast primes on fullframe with ibis looks so much fun to me. With a7r ii in future or a7s ii youll get what you want: more resolution or better iso. Your choice.

With 7d2:
14% improvement? Well 6d ia still better
More focus points? 1dx is till better.
The better solutions existed before. Cannot call it game changer 

I understand that for some people this ia what they were waiting for. But for most of the people 7d2 is an overkill. 6d looks like wiser option. Or a7, if you can live with slower af.


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## jrista (Dec 1, 2014)

TLN said:


> game changing, game changing, game changing, blah blah..
> 
> But show photos from 7d1 and 7d2 to people, and they' won't recognize what camera is where.
> 
> What is really game changing, sony A7 or a7s. Or new 5-axis sensor stabilization in A7 II. Btw it cost as much as 7d2.




You wouldn't want stabilization for astro...that would screw up your IQ, not make it better.


The lower dark current is certainly nice, but Canon had really high dark current before. Sony sensors dropped the dark current to phenomenally low levels a couple of years ago, along with the huge reductions in read noise.


It is indeed nice to have lower dark current, but having lower DC just means that read noise, which is still as high as ever (just less patterned) in the 7D II, means you cannot expose any less time than you used to with Canon cameras. You still have to expose as long as always to get faint detail above the read noise floor. (And dark current has always been dealt with via offsetting and dark frames...so it was never a huge problem to begin with.)


I recently found a guy who is using an EMCCD for astrophotography (I have the link at home...amazing stuff, his images, which use ultra short exposures, are nearly noise free). EMCCD cameras use electron multiplying gain to hypergain the signal way above the read noise floor. They are effectively free of RN, with less than 1e-. This guy uses 2-5 second exposures and integrates a few hundred to a thousand of them to get pretty amazing results...extremely faint detail that is EXTREMELY difficult to get with DSLRs and still somewhat difficult to get with standard CCDs. 

Read noise is the worst kind of noise for astrophotography. Without it, we could get amazing results with really basic mounts, without guiding, no one would care what their mounts PE was. The 7D II improves some things...but it still has Canon's same old high read noise. Elimination of banding is certainly a plus, and reduction in dark current is still a plus, but RN is STILL their limiting factor. 

Here's to hoping Canon has an ace up their sleeve for 2015...really want to see them produce something amazing on the sensor IQ front soon here.


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## AvTvM (Dec 1, 2014)

"Game changing" ... so utterly ridiculous!
14% ... another minor mirrorslapper iteration ... canon ground hog day.


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## neuroanatomist (Dec 1, 2014)

TLN said:


> What is really game changing, sony A7 or a7s. Or new 5-axis sensor stabilization in A7 II. Btw it cost as much as 7d2.



If a game-changing tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? Technically yes, but it really doesn't matter all that much. 

I'll bet the 7DII sells more than all the a7 models combined.


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## crazyklaus (Dec 1, 2014)

TLN said:


> With 7d2:
> 14% improvement? Well 6d ia still better
> More focus points? 1dx is till better.
> The better solutions existed before. Cannot call it game changer


Did you actually read the review?

Nowhere does it say that this is the best Canon DSLR in every respect. 
What it does say is: the dark current is so low that this is a game changer for people that need a low dark current.
What it also does say is: the AF system is so good that this is a game changer for people that can't afford a 1Dx.


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## justsomedude (Dec 1, 2014)

sick.


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## steliosk (Dec 1, 2014)

"perfect levels for the sensor with lower apparent read noise and impressively low pattern noise compared to all other current CANON (and ONLY Canon) cameras"
- FACT

7D2 might be a complete camera with robust body, ergonomics and inherited AF system from 1DX but there is STILL room for even a better sensor

Canon has a loooong long way to go to fix some major problems with bigger steps. Problems such as DR pattern banding when pushing the shadows, where Sony sensors (not cameras) has already fixed that.

so Canon might provide a more complete overall camera and might sell like crazy but that doesn't mean that has the best sensor in the market.


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## Phil Lowe (Dec 1, 2014)

> With 7d2:
> 14% improvement? Well 6d ia still better



Put a 600mm lens on a 6D and try to shoot a bird-in-flight then tell me the 6D is better. "Better" is a relative term, and to make such a generalization is unwarranted.



> More focus points? 1dx is till better.



1DX has 61, 41 of which are cross-type. 7D2 has 65, alll of which are cross-type. Your statement is demonstrably false.



> The better solutions existed before. Cannot call it game changer



A focus system better than the 1DX or 5D3 for $1799, which is 1/3 the price of the former and 1/2 the price of the latter? That is a game changer.

I own the 7D2. It is significantly better than my 7D in performance, and faster than my 5D3 when shooting wildlife. It does not match the low-light performance of the 1DX, 5D3, or 6D, but they don't provide a 1.6x crop factor, meaning I have more reach with every lens in my bag without having to buy new lenses.


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## Don Haines (Dec 1, 2014)

TLN said:


> I understand that for some people this ia what they were waiting for. But for most of the people 7d2 is an overkill. 6d looks like wiser option. Or a7, if you can live with slower af.



The 7D2 was never designed as a camera for the masses. It was designed as a high speed action camera for those who wanted a crop factor. For most of it's target market, it is the best thing out there.

A 6D is a superb LANDSCAPE camera.... but try tracking a chickadee flying through the trees with it.... Then try it with a 7D2. There is a lot to be said about using the right tool for the job and for the segment that the 7D2 was designed for, a kick-ass AF system is by far the most important aspect of camera performance. Yes, everyone would be even happier with more DR, less read noise, or even FF IQ, but as said many times in the past, who cares what the DR is of a blurry picture.


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## Marauder (Dec 1, 2014)

Great review. The 7D Mark II is exactly the camera I'd hoped it would be. 

LOL at the thread immediately being high-jacked by the "it's no good if it's not mirrorless and Sony" crowd, which seems to happen every time anyone writes something positive about the 7D Mark II (or any Canon camera for that matter). Eminently predictable! :


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## raptor3x (Dec 1, 2014)

steliosk said:


> Canon has a loooong long way to go to fix some major problems with bigger steps. Problems such as DR pattern banding when pushing the shadows, where Sony sensors (not cameras) has already fixed that



The random noise component of the read noise is still an issue, but the 7D2 has fixed the pattern noise issue more or less completely.


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## risc32 (Dec 2, 2014)

neuroanatomist said:


> TLN said:
> 
> 
> > What is really game changing, sony A7 or a7s. Or new 5-axis sensor stabilization in A7 II. Btw it cost as much as 7d2.
> ...



nice, and ditto.


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## vrpanorama (Dec 2, 2014)

I am current owner of a 6D, and see a lot of my colleague switching to Sony, Canon has no choice, it cannot compare its product offering just by looking of their current niche, they need to be aggressive and respond to Sony, the 7D ii is not yet a response to this


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## Renzokuken (Dec 2, 2014)

> This review includes an analysis of noise, dynamic range, and full well capacity of a Canon 7D Mark II camera. The Canon 7D Mark II is the latest in the Canon (APS-C) 1.6-crop DSLR lineup. The performance is so exceptional it is a game changing camera in the Canon lineup.



When I read this at the very beginning of the review, I know I can only take it with a pinch of salt

I invite you to take a look here:

http://www.dpreview.com/previews/canon-eos-7d-mark-ii/10

Compare it to Nikon's D7100 (direct competitor from 2013)
Select Raw > ISO 100 > [Select chunk of words in the upper-middle frame]

See for yourself which camera/sensor captured more details.

"Game changing camera" in the Canon lineup. Yea right


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## unfocused (Dec 2, 2014)

Marauder said:


> Great review. The 7D Mark II is exactly the camera I'd hoped it would be.
> 
> LOL at the thread immediately being high-jacked by the "it's no good if it's not mirrorless and Sony" crowd, which seems to happen every time anyone writes something positive about the 7D Mark II (or any Canon camera for that matter). Eminently predictable! :



Yes. I just laugh at these trolls. Not worth responding to them. No matter how many positive reviews there are, they will always find something to complain about. Meanwhile, Canon just keeps selling cameras.


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## someone (Dec 2, 2014)

TLN said:


> Well, i can call game changer new technology, new features, something that never been done before.
> 7d2 in evolution of 7d. It is bwtter here and there, and we can expect it from canon. This is not a revolution of technology, so its hardly a gme changer.
> 
> But a7 is.
> ...



It's not a game changer if you can't take a full advantages of it. I mean a lot of people who see 7D2 as basically a 1D4 that cost under $2k. I mean it features a lots of things people who can't afford to pay $5k+ camera many years ago. And now it's under $2k.

OK, I get that the A7 series are mirrorless, but that's neither good nor bad. There are things that mirrorless is better but there are still things that dSLR better at. Maybe in a few years when electronic viewfinder can actually become superior in every way than tradition mirror box, but it's not here now. At this point I see them as a equal, even though in my case they aren't as good for how I shoot.

A7r and the Nikon D8xx series, yes it's a nice sensor, but then again most people who take 10fps doesn't care about that much MP. I mean, how many people actually use that much resolution on a daily basis? I don't. Maybe in the next decade when I very want to make a wall-size print then yes. Right now, most of my print, I would say 12-16MP will probably do. 20MP will just give a bit of cropping lee-way. And 30MP+ is kinda over kill and take too much time and storage for the RAW workflow.

A72 and the IBIS. I very hope this work. Yes I want it too, but I can't say if it's good of bad yet. I have seen in the past that IBIS aren't just as good as optical one. Maybe this is the one, but I can't say that. Neither can you. Nobody have a review out yet to say the IBIS in A72 is the real deal and not just a gimmick.

If all you or anyone is taking snapshot then most interchangeable lens cameras are overkill. I start shooting back when it was film, and pick up my first dSLR, the original dRebel (300D), then 20D then 5D2. For each upgrade, I basically out grow the camera. Meaning I take the camera to the limit and then I start doing things camera can't do anymore. So, I actually see camera as a tool. Yes, there are spec to the camera, but then I don't shoot pictures w/ spec sheet. There are things that won't be in the spec list. Like electronic viewfinder can they keep up w/ fast moving subject? Or how fast the camera empty the buffer. Depending on the style of photography you do, camera sensor aren't everything. People keep comparing camera sensor like it's the holy grail, and while it's important, people shouldn't ignore all the stuff that happened before the image hit the sensor. Even though for many people, they see Canon recent dSLR as rather slow to adoption(especially when mostly viewed from the camera sensor PoV), on the other hand many serious photographers and pro see them as a more balance system.


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## someone (Dec 2, 2014)

Phil Lowe said:


> 1DX has 61, 41 of which are cross-type. 7D2 has 65, alll of which are cross-type. Your statement is demonstrably false.


It's partially correct. I wouldn't call 1DX nor 7D2 better. If anything 1DX is slightly better.
What you missed is that while 1DX and 5D3 have less AF point and less cross-type, they also have more dual cross-type AF points, 5 in the 1DX & 5D3 while only a center one in 7D2. Also, while all of the cross-type points except for the center AF point in 7D2 are f/5.6 vertical and horizontal, some of the cross-type points in 1DX and 5D3 are f/4 horizontal and f/5.6 vertical and the rest of the cross-type would be the f/5.6. What this means is that there will be things that better suited for AF system in the 1DX/5D3 and oppose is true in the 7D2. Okay, now back to what I said about 1DX would be slightly better, this has nothing to do w/ the AF, but somewhat related and only apply to the 1D series. To summarize it, 1D series use battery w/ higher voltage and thus can drive the motor in the lens faster. This is what Chuck Westfall have said in the past. While the true is this being faster or slower is mini-skew, some could benefit from this. People who very demand the top performance would. For most of us, this means nothing. Still, since we can't put this benefit in the 7D2 nor cane it be taken out of the 1DX, then I have no choice but to call that it's slightly better if the AF system are consider equal.


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## e17paul (Dec 2, 2014)

It's interesting to note the comments on button placement. Two hands are ideal, but better one handed use can make a real difference when when part way up a construction site ladder, or other tricky places.


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## weixing (Dec 2, 2014)

Renzokuken said:


> > This review includes an analysis of noise, dynamic range, and full well capacity of a Canon 7D Mark II camera. The Canon 7D Mark II is the latest in the Canon (APS-C) 1.6-crop DSLR lineup. The performance is so exceptional it is a game changing camera in the Canon lineup.
> 
> 
> 
> ...


Hi,
Hmm... The D7100 image had better contrast, look sharper and got a bit more details (I think due to better contrast and a bit more resolution) in the fine print, but from my monitor, the fine print in the D7100 image got a lot more yellowish and blueish... is yellowish and blueish colouring in the fine print really exist in the actual scene?? IMHO, depreview should also provide an "actual reference image" for user to compare.

By the way, we should remember that the 7D2 like the 70D is dual pixels, so it's actually a 40MP sensor in an APS-C size... with that in mind, I think the 7D2 IQ is very good... I just wonder how the IQ really look like at full 40MP... may be Canon should provide a mode (look like a new project for ML??) to output the full 40MP size image.

Have a nice day.


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## Bennymiata (Dec 2, 2014)

e17paul said:


> It's interesting to note the comments on button placement. Two hands are ideal, but better one handed use can make a real difference when when part way up a construction site ladder, or other tricky places.



The button layout is quite good actually, as all the shooting buttons are on the right hand side, and the playback buttons on the left.
And it's exactly the same as my 5D3.


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## Ivan Muller (Dec 2, 2014)

'so Canon might provide a more complete overall camera and might sell like crazy but that doesn't mean that has the best sensor in the market.'

agreed! but what else can one look at but the 'total' offering from a brand? the Sony's sure look good and very tempting but there are just too many little question marks that worry me like the shutter vibration, softer corners compared to Canon, EVF, no shift and tilt lenses, less backup and availability in my neck of the woods, etc etc so for a Canon owner the 7D2 is as good as its going to get, and frankly that's not bad at all and probably far exceeds what most photographers here are capable off anyway...and that goes not just for Canon but all the other brands as well....things are pretty good at the moment !

The Alpha range from sony of course could be used in a Canon system via adaptors, which sound perfect theoretically but the lack of corner sharpness is too uncertain for me to commit to that idea yet....


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## scyrene (Dec 2, 2014)

Phil Lowe said:


> A focus system better than the 1DX or 5D3 for $1799, which is 1/3 the price of the former and 1/2 the price of the latter? That is a game changer.
> 
> I own the 7D2. It is significantly better than my 7D in performance, and faster than my 5D3 when shooting wildlife. It does not match the low-light performance of the 1DX, 5D3, or 6D, but they don't provide a 1.6x crop factor, meaning I have more reach with every lens in my bag without having to buy new lenses.



And you regain that light by not having to add on a teleconverter in many cases. Nobody seems to talk about that.


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## Marauder (Dec 2, 2014)

Marauder said:


> Great review. The 7D Mark II is exactly the camera I'd hoped it would be.
> 
> LOL at the thread immediately being high-jacked by the "it's no good if it's not mirrorless and Sony" crowd, which seems to happen every time anyone writes something positive about the 7D Mark II (or any Canon camera for that matter). Eminently predictable! :



Precisely! Sometimes I laugh and sometimes I sigh. Personally, I am very enthusiastic about the 7D Mark II. I get it's not the camera for everyone--not everything fits a given photographer's needs. I just don't get why the people who love Sony sensors and various mirrorless designs from Sony and Samsung don't just go purchase those brands instead of complaining about it here. Don't like the 7D2---don't get one! Excited about the Sony A7R or the Samsung NX 1--go purchase one! Get the camera you want and go out and take great images!


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## justaCanonuser (Dec 2, 2014)

Very good review, I appreciate Roger Clarks attempt to scientifically compare the original 7D with the 7D2: 0.2 stops more sensitivity fits btw well into other thorough reviews. Looks like the 7D2 is really worth an upgrade for 7D users.


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## neuroanatomist (Dec 2, 2014)

Phil Lowe said:


> A focus system better than the 1DX or 5D3 for $1799, which is 1/3 the price of the former and 1/2 the price of the latter? That is a game changer.
> 
> I own the 7D2. It is significantly better than my 7D in performance, and faster than my 5D3 when shooting wildlife. It does not match the low-light performance of the 1DX, 5D3, or 6D, but they don't provide a 1.6x crop factor, meaning I have more reach with every lens in my bag without having to buy new lenses.



I wouldn't say the 7DII AF is better than the 1D X, more of a wash. On the 1D X, with an f/2.8 or faster lens you have more dual cross points, and with an f/4 or faster lens you have more accurate cross-type toward the sides of the frame. On the 7DII, with an f/5.6 lens you have all cross-type points, and you have a better spread of AF points across the (cropped) frame. AF is also faster on the 1D X, thanks to the higher battery voltage. 

But to get AF performance on par with a 1-series body for the price of the 7DII, along with more (apparent) reach without having to buy new lenses, highlights what remains the _real_ crop body advantage – lower cost.


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## justaCanonuser (Dec 2, 2014)

Marauder said:


> Marauder said:
> 
> 
> > Great review. The 7D Mark II is exactly the camera I'd hoped it would be.
> ...



+10

Canonrumors should create an anti-bullshit-app that allows readers to mask all posts including the terms "Nikon", "Sony", "D810" and "A7" (or better, an app with customizable bullshit settings). As a user, I appreciate that those companies make very good cameras and put pressure on Canon to impove their products. But I am getting more and more tired to flick through all this nonsense to find serious posts worth reading.


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## jaayres20 (Dec 2, 2014)

TLN said:


> game changing, game changing, game changing, blah blah..
> 
> But show photos from 7d1 and 7d2 to people, and they' won't recognize what camera is where.
> 
> What is really game changing, sony A7 or a7s. Or new 5-axis sensor stabilization in A7 II. Btw it cost as much as 7d2.


Nobody can look at an image created with a sony sensor, without looking at the metadata, and say, wow look at that picture, it sure must have been taken with a sony or nikon camera. Yet we are lead to believe that you can't take a usable image, let alone a good one, unless you are using a sony or nikon camera.


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## AvTvM (Dec 2, 2014)

jaayres20 said:


> TLN said:
> 
> 
> > game changing, game changing, game changing, blah blah..
> ...



That's not "what people are saying". All that people are saying, 0.2 stops better Hi ISO or 14% of this or that or a few more AF fields ... are NOT game changing. 

An compact camera with a fantastic full-frame sensor in a box half the size and weight of any previously used boxes ... with 80% more resolution and better low ISO DR and image quality than those older, larger boxes ... with image capturing capability and user interface on par or better than those older, fatter boxes ... without any moving parts inside, more robust, more durable, immune to misalignments of components ... with zero vibrations, zero noise ... with stabilizer working with all lenses ... with a viewfinder that shows the image exactly as it will be captured, working even in extremely low light levels ... that's a game changer to me. Looking forward to the Sony A9. ;D


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## shutterlag (Dec 2, 2014)

TLN said:


> game changing, game changing, game changing, blah blah..
> 
> But show photos from 7d1 and 7d2 to people, and they' won't recognize what camera is where.
> 
> What is really game changing, sony A7 or a7s. Or new 5-axis sensor stabilization in A7 II. Btw it cost as much as 7d2.



OK, so I've read the rest of your posts. You obviously haven't used those A7* bodies in the real world or payed attention to the lens lineup. While they have their merits, and in several ways NUKE Canon, they also have their faults. 

The AF is HORRIBLE- I mean I'd rather shoot manual with them than try to use the AF. There are zero improvements in the A7m2 as far as AF - they tweaked the firmware only. 

The A7R shutter slap might as well the a full-blown thunder clap, is so fracking loud, I've never heard anything like it in digital.

The IBIS is wicked, I agree, and blatantly demonstrates that Canon and Nikon have been ripping us off for years charging extra for IS in lenses when they could have done IBIS. But the bottom line is that it doesn't offer "better" IS, just IS across the board with all lenses. 

The Sony FE lens lineup is severely gimped- so much so that no pro can use it IMO. There is NO F2.8 STANDARD ZOOM, NO F2.8 70-200 ZOOM, and the ZEISS 24-70mm F4 is so soft I'd rather use the kit lens. Sure, you can bolt on an adapter, but at that point, why not use something else with better AF? The 55mm prime is wicked, and the 35mm F2.8 is nice and small, but that hardly makes up for a complete lack of zooms.

Bottom line: Yes, A7k lineup is shiny, but not ready for prime time, not even close. Fix the AF (must be at least as good as the A6000), release F2.8 zooms (or at least fix the garbage Zeiss 24-70mm F4), and add a 2nd card slot. The A9 should be nice next year and take care of the AF and card issues, but that lens issue is going to plague the system for many more years. While the IBIS offers no significant advantage in the short term, it does make Canon and Nikon look silly, which is good


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## raptor3x (Dec 2, 2014)

AvTvM said:


> ... without any moving parts inside, more robust, more durable, immune to misalignments of components ... with zero vibrations, zero noise ... with stabilizer working with all lenses ...



This combination would indeed be quite impressive, ;D.


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## CaptainZero (Dec 2, 2014)

I'm hoping to have one before Christmas to replace my 7D. Everything about this seems to be an upgrade, although, I still prefer the two back button zooming in preview of my 7D over my 5D3.

Even if that Sony camera was better in every way, I still couldn't stand a camera that small. My big mitts like a larger body, preferably gripped.


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## jaayres20 (Dec 2, 2014)

AvTvM said:


> jaayres20 said:
> 
> 
> > TLN said:
> ...



-A smaller camera is not a better camera, bigger cameras carry bigger lenses better.
-A DSLR currently has much better, faster AF, more accurate AF. Which means using a mirror, which means a bigger camera. A little mirrorless camera cannot keep up with sports or wildlife which makes the low ISO (which sports or wildlife photographers hardly use) DR irrelevant.
-5 Axis image stabilization with no moving parts inside?????
-Zero noise???
-An electronic viewfinder is irrelevant to me because I can use the in camera meter to nail my exposure 99% of the time. Also, a lot of times I shoot with flash and my ambient light is very underexposed and I still want to see what is going on in the frame. 

With all of this excellent image quality coming out of these little sony cameras, the only benefit you get from them is at low ISO with a still subject. And both of those things are almost useless to me.


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## The Flasher (Dec 2, 2014)

jrista said:


> TLN said:
> 
> 
> > game changing, game changing, game changing, blah blah..
> ...



Wouldn't you want a full frame body for astro for more coverage given lenses.. Plus I'm sure stabilization an be turned off.

I'm biased as I'm on my last few days of shooting with A7R demo w/ Metabones adapter. This system takes some getting used to, but I have to say for anything slow and steady (product, fashion, studio etc) this camera is fantastic. FANTASTIC. Image quality and resolution is phenomenal. I also shot with the original A7 and images were similar to my 6D.


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## Lee Jay (Dec 2, 2014)

AvTvM said:


> That's not "what people are saying". All that people are saying, 0.2 stops better Hi ISO or 14% of this or that or a few more AF fields ... are NOT game changing.



I'd say that it is. It's a professional level sports and action camera in a compact body for 1/4 the cost. That's a game changer for me. I hate the 1D bodies, and I wouldn't pay for them even if I didn't. This way, I get a body I like at a cost I can justify, all with terrific image quality and a great support system.



> An compact camera with a fantastic full-frame sensor in a box half the size and weight of any previously used boxes ... with 80% more resolution and better low ISO DR and image quality than those older, larger boxes ... with image capturing capability and user interface on par or better than those older, fatter boxes ... without any moving parts inside, more robust, more durable, immune to misalignments of components ... with zero vibrations, zero noise ... with stabilizer working with all lenses ... with a viewfinder that shows the image exactly as it will be captured, working even in extremely low light levels ... that's a game changer to me. Looking forward to the Sony A9. ;D



That sounds like a pretty ho-hum thing. Lousy viewfinder, lousy focus performance, high cost, exceptionally poor system support. Almost totally useless for 95% of what I shoot. If someone gave me one, I'd just sell it without opening the box.


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## jrista (Dec 2, 2014)

The Flasher said:


> jrista said:
> 
> 
> > TLN said:
> ...




Depends...it's all about image scale in astro, unless your goal is just to go for a massive field. That field costs you detail, though, as simply swapping to a sensor with larger pixels tends to result in undersampling, when you really want to oversample by at least 2-3x (otherwise, stars end up looking square.)


I still use the 7D for astro imaging. I like the big field of the 5D III, but it definitely lacks the resolution, and there is no question the read noise levels are higher. I get much better sampling with the 7D than with the 5D III. It's all about the tradeoffs. 



The Flasher said:


> I'm biased as I'm on my last few days of shooting with A7R demo w/ Metabones adapter. This system takes some getting used to, but I have to say for anything slow and steady (product, fashion, studio etc) this camera is fantastic. FANTASTIC. Image quality and resolution is phenomenal. I also shot with the original A7 and images were similar to my 6D.




I totally agree. I rented an A7r myself, with the Metabones adapter, and used my Canon lenses. I am not a fan of the body ergonomics or buttons, and the EVF lags too much for me. I liked some of the EVF displays, and I thought the overall menu functionality was fairly rich and complete. The big thing with the A7r is the IQ, as you state...it is just PHENOMENAL! I loved it. It trounced the 5D III IQ. For landscapes, I think it would be superb, however I did not feel good buying one with rumors that Sony was going to be dropping a new one some time early 2015.


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## Don Haines (Dec 2, 2014)

Lee Jay said:


> AvTvM said:
> 
> 
> > That's not "what people are saying". All that people are saying, 0.2 stops better Hi ISO or 14% of this or that or a few more AF fields ... are NOT game changing.
> ...


My opinion: The 7D2 is not revolutionary, it is evolutionary. There is nothing in it that hasn't been done before, it's just a bit better than a whole lot of cameras at a whole lot of things... but when all those improvements are rolled in together in one package, it adds up to a significant overall improvement...

AF Almost as good as the 1DX
burst rate almost as good as the 1DX
weather sealing a bit better than the 1DX
DPAF a bit better than the 7D
Video a bit better than the 70D
IQ a bit better than the 70D
noise a bit lower than the 70D
ergonomics about the same as the 5D3

Nothing new here, just the best (or slightly better) features from those that have gone before in one affordable package... Is it a game changer? I don't think so.... but it is a wonderful tool that will probably sell quite well and will have a loyal following, like the 7D before it.


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## Lee Jay (Dec 2, 2014)

Don Haines said:


> Lee Jay said:
> 
> 
> > AvTvM said:
> ...



The 1Dx is $6,900 and enormous, and the 5D3 is $3,200. Neither has a popup flash (which, despite the stuck-up noses of some, is a very useful thing). So, it's a game changer because people like me will own it, when we don't own either of the other two.

That said, I'd love a full-frame version. Call it a 5D4 and I'll probably buy it for around the 5D3 cost.


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## Lee Jay (Dec 2, 2014)

jrista said:


> Read noise is the worst kind of noise for astrophotography. Without it, we could get amazing results with really basic mounts, without guiding, no one would care what their mounts PE was. The 7D II improves some things...but it still has Canon's same old high read noise. Elimination of banding is certainly a plus, and reduction in dark current is still a plus, but RN is STILL their limiting factor.



Elsewhere you recommended the D810 and D5100. The RN at ISO 1600 (often used for astro) for these cameras are:

D810 - 3.5
D5100 - 3.6
7DII - 2.8/2.4 (Sensorgen/Clarkvision)

So, don't you think you're being just a tad disingenuous? You were recommending a cascade type sensor above with very short exposures. Again, that equated to very high ISOs. The 7DII is again better than the above two cameras at ISOs from 1,600 to 12,800 in this area, with higher QE as well.

The only area I can find where Canon is lagging is low ISO RN, not high ISO. While I'd love it if they'd do better there (cleaner is always good), that's the least important place to have low read noise.


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## Don Haines (Dec 2, 2014)

Lee Jay said:


> Don Haines said:
> 
> 
> > Lee Jay said:
> ...


Agreed! My suspicion is that the 5D4 will be a FF 7D2, probably with a few more minor improvements....

For me, both the 1Dx and 5D3 were too expensive and not really an option. The 7D2 replaced a 60D and does everything a bit better with one exception... AF. The 7D2 AF system makes the 60D look like a broken kid's toy. I can certainly understand why the 1DX owners love their AF....


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## fragilesi (Dec 2, 2014)

There seems to be almost a desperation on here to talk Canon down particularly set against Sony. The constant stream of posts about them is beyond the norm and from some we're getting a stream of one-sided comment aimed at persuading people rather than offering balanced opinion.

I'm not a conspiracy theorist but it's obvious that Sony are doing some things right but are miles behind in other ways. What is it that's driving some people to take such a biased viewpoint rather than engaging in sensible discussion?

Like I say, some of it (not all obviously) is starting to just sound desperate. Almost as if the Sony marketing department, having seen the losses Sony are making have decided to make one cheap, last-ditch effort to invade Canon fora and try to get a few people to jump on a sinking ship!


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## neuroanatomist (Dec 2, 2014)

jaayres20 said:


> Nobody can look at an image created with a sony sensor, without looking at the metadata, and say, wow look at that picture, it sure must have been taken with a sony or nikon camera. Yet we are lead to believe that you can't take a usable image, let alone a good one, unless you are using a sony or nikon camera.



That's only because you don't know how to shoot to properly demonstrate a difference. Once you start severely underexposing all your images then pushing them 5 stops in post, you'll be singing a different tune. 






AvTvM said:


> An compact camera with a fantastic full-frame sensor in a box *half the size and weight* of any previously used boxes ... with 80% more resolution and better low ISO DR and image quality than those older, larger boxes ... with image capturing capability and *user interface on par or better* than those older, fatter boxes ... without any moving parts inside, more robust, more durable, immune to misalignments of components ... *with zero vibrations*, zero noise ... with stabilizer working with all lenses ... with a viewfinder that shows the image exactly as it will be captured, working even in extremely low light levels ... that's a game changer to me. Looking forward to the Sony A9. ;D



A body too small to hold comfortably with a 70-200/2.8 or larger, with Sony's byzantine user interface, and a known issue with shutter-induced vibration (on the a7R) isn't going to be changing my game. Glad you're happy about it, though...


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## Marsu42 (Dec 2, 2014)

fragilesi said:


> There seems to be almost a desperation on here to talk Canon down particularly set against Sony. The constant stream of posts about them is beyond the norm and from some we're getting a stream of one-sided comment aimed at persuading people rather than offering balanced opinion.



My impression is different - very few (if any) people outside 1st posters claim that the Sony/Nikon system is "better" all around. It just depends on how much you want their gimmicks and sensor advantage (dr at low iso & resolution).

The grass is always greener on the other side, and during long periods of Canon releasing nothing of interest to the enthusiast dslr crowd of course discussion is about what's up next ... and Canon doesn't seem to have that much of "up next" in the sensor department that leaks to the public apart from their dpaf.



fragilesi said:


> What is it that's driving some people to take such a biased viewpoint rather than engaging in sensible discussion?



As far as I can see it, there's bias on both sides of the discussion. People wishing for more dr or resolution often get flamed to a crisp as an alleged vocal, but insignificant minority or get told that proper use of their gear wouldn't require any sensor advancements at all.

One particular bias pro Sony/Nikon probably is that you can *read* their "better" specs in no time, but to experience the upsides of the Canon system or the problems with rapid-release Sony you have to actually use that gear.


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## jrista (Dec 2, 2014)

Lee Jay said:


> jrista said:
> 
> 
> > Read noise is the worst kind of noise for astrophotography. Without it, we could get amazing results with really basic mounts, without guiding, no one would care what their mounts PE was. The 7D II improves some things...but it still has Canon's same old high read noise. Elimination of banding is certainly a plus, and reduction in dark current is still a plus, but RN is STILL their limiting factor.
> ...




The problem with ISO 1600 and up is you are SEVERELY limited in dynamic range. I already explained this, but at higher ISO, you suffer from star clipping. The benefit of the D810 would be that you could use it at ISO 100, and STILL have ~3e- RN. You gain all that DR, avoid clipping your stars (ever, unless you were doing ludicrously long exposures), and have similar RN to the 7D II at ISO settings several times higher that suffer from serious DR issues. You could also expose for a lot longer at ISO 100 with filters, than you could at higher ISO without filters, which is a very critical point. 


With my 7D and 5D III (and the 7D actually has less read noise), I am still limited in how long I can expose not because I cannot guide smoothly long enough to get longer exposures (I can take guided exposures to about 15 minutes now), but because if I expose longer than 7-8 minutes, my stars end up clipping too much...and that is at ISO 400!


If there was ever a form of photography that needed dynamic range, astrophotography is it. More so than anything else, landscapes included. I mean, just run the numbers. If you start with 3e- RN, expose 100 frames such that stars are exposed to 45ke- at ISO 100 on a D800 (and the background is still RN limited), then you reduce the noise by a factor of SQRT(100), or 10x. In terms of dynamic range, the stacked image has 20*log(45000/(3/10)) * 6, or 103.5dB or 17.25 stops of dynamic range (saved in a 32-bit float FITS file.) And it can always be argued that you should stack more...once you start stretching the dimmer nebula or galaxy data, the "low" noise becomes worse, it's a digital post-processing exposure boost on the deep shadow tones. So, 200 subs, 400 subs (when using DSLR, things are a lot better with mono CCDs and you don't need to stack as much to get clean, low-noise results.) I've stacked 208 subs for a Pleiades image, and it's probably approaching 20 stops...oh, wait...it's not, because I am using a Canon a ISO 400, where I am severely DR limited and cannot get the same kind of exposure as I could with a D800 at ISO 100. I'm probably at 15-16 stops (before background extraction, which again increases noise, meaning I could probably do with 400 subs!  ) DR...it's beyond critically important for astro.


So no, it's not disingenuous. The 7D II has less noise than the D810 at high ISO, but the D800 or D810 or D5100 or D5300 could be used at ISO 100 or 200 with RN that is still extremely low. I would still take 5.6e- RN at ISO 100 with the black point hack, and just expose a little longer, over 2.8e- RN at ISO 1600, simply because I would rather expose longer and more deeply, and NOT have to deal with clipped stars, than expose for a shorter time and have to deal with heavily clipped stars. Clipped stars are harsh, colorless, and lifeless...not what I want in my images.


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## scyrene (Dec 2, 2014)

AvTvM said:


> jaayres20 said:
> 
> 
> > TLN said:
> ...



Though of course mirrorless ILC sensors are more at risk of dirt and dust, as they're exposed whenever you change lenses.


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## neuroanatomist (Dec 2, 2014)

raptor3x said:


> AvTvM said:
> 
> 
> > ... *without any moving parts inside*, more robust, more durable, immune to misalignments of components ... with zero vibrations, zero noise ... *with stabilizer working with all lenses *...
> ...



+1


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## shutterlag (Dec 2, 2014)

GraFax said:


> shutterlag said:
> 
> 
> > TLN said:
> ...



Agreed. I normally don't feed the troll but in this case pretty much all of what I wrote was my own personal frustration on the topic. If Canon was actually innovating I wouldn't have to be looking at Sony. Even without a viable FE standard zoom I will be changing over to the A9. I'm tired of getting ripped off by Canon paying for image stabilization that should be in body. I'm also tired of subpar low-light performance. I'm also tired of subpar dynamic range performance. I'm also tired of lugging around heavy gear with antiquated mirror boxes. I'm annoyed I have to do that though. I am excited about getting the A9. I'll fill the gaps with the Alpha adapter. My back will be much happier with the lighter kit. The completely silent shutter will be nice as well. I'm sure the autofocus won't be on par with the 7d Mark 2, but having used the a6000 I'm sure it will be good enough.


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## Don Haines (Dec 2, 2014)

neuroanatomist said:


> raptor3x said:
> 
> 
> > AvTvM said:
> ...


+1
I would love to see an internal 5 axis stabilization system with no moving parts.....


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## AshtonNekolah (Dec 2, 2014)

Thats why I like this guy he knows what he's talking about!!!

I forgot to point this part out I also notice this could be or just a wild guess that there is no touch screen on these kind of bodies, people that do extreme shooting in cold weather a touch screen is a no show, buttons always provide better contacts and wearing gloves will be a problem in cold weather touching that screen.


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## The Flasher (Dec 2, 2014)

jrista said:


> The Flasher said:
> 
> 
> > jrista said:
> ...



Yes exactly, bring it Sony. The large mp Canon rumors are also swirling, however whatever the camera Canon brings to market, I doubt that it will be within the same price point. All I need is that IQ.


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## meywd (Dec 2, 2014)

shutterlag said:


> GraFax said:
> 
> 
> > shutterlag said:
> ...



Tbh there are too many trolls these day, but it is clear you are not one and have a clear need and knowledge of the limitation of each system, i am a gadget lover at heart, i want 1000 FPS, Hubble level low light IQ, and fast tracking AF, but i know what is reality and what is fiction, plus what Canon delivers is not some mediocre stuff, or Pros won't use it, i see Canon is close to how Apple is going with iPhone and iPad, release stuff that strengthen the current offerings, and innovate some features every now and then, Android devices(Samsung, HTC) are like Nokia with outsourced heart, but Sony is not Google, its more like Microsoft, don't get me wrong, i am a Microsoft technology Developer, and i love Sony (PS3-PS4, VAIO, TVs,,) but they are both doing it wrong, they are releasing half stuff, tbh i didn't try either (Lumia nor A7) but the feedback is more than enough, i hope both do it right, because more competition means lower prices and maybe i can have a 600mm f/4


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## fragilesi (Dec 3, 2014)

Marsu42 said:


> My impression is different - very few (if any) people outside 1st posters claim that the Sony/Nikon system is "better" all around. It just depends on how much you want their gimmicks and sensor advantage (dr at low iso & resolution).
> 
> The grass is always greener on the other side, and during long periods of Canon releasing nothing of interest to the enthusiast dslr crowd of course discussion is about what's up next ... and Canon doesn't seem to have that much of "up next" in the sensor department that leaks to the public apart from their dpaf.
> 
> ...



I think you've hit the mark with that last paragraph and certainly there is bias on both sides but again on a Canon forum wanting to talk about what is an excellent new release the thread is hijacked by this Sony marketing team talking about this mysterious IS system with no moving parts . . .

And I'm sorry I simply don't understand how given the recent lens releases and the advances in some areas that the 70d and 7dII have undoubtedly made for the APS-C DSLRs how anyone can say that Canon aren't releasing anything of interest. I understand that if someone's prime interest is more DR then they will feel frustrated, we all get that. It's the need to place it on a pedastel far above almost anything else and ignore the fact that it's no more essential to taking good pictures than many other things that leaves many of us puzzled. 

And there are clearly hints that Canon is looking at their sensors and improvements in those cameras.


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## Marsu42 (Dec 3, 2014)

fragilesi said:


> And I'm sorry I simply don't understand how given the recent lens releases and the advances in some areas that the 70d and 7dII have undoubtedly made for the APS-C DSLRs how anyone can say that Canon aren't releasing anything of interest.



Well, things have indeed improved lately, but there has been a while w/o apparent progress so this impression lags behind even if there are good releases like the 7d2 and 100-400L2. I feel that the 70d was just "more of the same" tough, and Canon's IS primes don't appeal to a lot of stills shooters while they fall behind Sigma with fast traditional L primes. Just look at their 50mm offerings.



fragilesi said:


> And there are clearly hints that Canon is looking at their sensors and improvements in those cameras.



I wouldn't say [CR-anything] is a hint, there's nothing real from Canon about where they're going with their larger digital sensors. Everything they do so far is evolutionary improvement. Nothing wrong with that, but it makes you wonder if they have the will, patents and r&d for a revolutionary step like Sony with their exmor design and high-mp sensors for the masses.

Canon certainly appears to be heading in a certain direction, imho mirrorless with good on-sensor dual pixel af, featuring moderate resolution and good medium iso capability. They'll also integrate video and stills as this is what a good part of the consumer market uses. Unfortunately for some, this doesn't necessarily appeal to the die-hard old-school enthusiast looking for the edge with fast primes and high dr/resolution. 

Disclaimer: I'm note here to defend or attack Canon, just stating my subjective observation.


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## justaCanonuser (Dec 3, 2014)

neuroanatomist said:


> I wouldn't say the 7DII AF is better than the 1D X, more of a wash. On the 1D X, with an f/2.8 or faster lens you have more dual cross points, and with an f/4 or faster lens you have more accurate cross-type toward the sides of the frame. On the 7DII, with an f/5.6 lens you have all cross-type points, and you have a better spread of AF points across the (cropped) frame. AF is also faster on the 1D X, thanks to the higher battery voltage.



+1
Bryan Carnathan got Canon's Chuck Westfall to explain the main differences of the AF systems in the 7D2, 1D-X, and 5D3 on his TDP site. It's worth reading:
http://www.the-digital-picture.com/Comparisons/Canon-EOS-7D-II-1D-X-5D-III-AF-Comparison.aspx


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## neuroanatomist (Dec 3, 2014)

fragilesi said:


> And I'm sorry I simply don't understand how given the recent lens releases and the advances in some areas that the 70d and 7dII have undoubtedly made for the APS-C DSLRs how anyone can say that Canon aren't releasing anything of interest. I understand that if someone's prime interest is more DR then they will feel frustrated, we all get that. It's the need to place it on a pedastel far above almost anything else and ignore the fact that it's no more essential to taking good pictures than many other things that leaves many of us puzzled.



+1000




Marsu42 said:


> Well, things have indeed improved lately, but there has been a while w/o apparent progress so this impression lags behind even if there are good releases like the 7d2 and 100-400L2. I feel that the 70d was just "more of the same" tough, and Canon's IS primes don't appeal to a lot of stills shooters while they fall behind Sigma with fast traditional L primes.



The 70D got the 7D's AF (after three generations of the 40D's AF), and was the first camera to have dual-pixel AF. So...nothing new there. :

Did the 16-35/4L IS appeal to a few stills photographers? Or has no one mentioned wanting a corner-to-corner-sharp UWA zoom?


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## Don Haines (Dec 3, 2014)

justaCanonuser said:


> neuroanatomist said:
> 
> 
> > I wouldn't say the 7DII AF is better than the 1D X, more of a wash. On the 1D X, with an f/2.8 or faster lens you have more dual cross points, and with an f/4 or faster lens you have more accurate cross-type toward the sides of the frame. On the 7DII, with an f/5.6 lens you have all cross-type points, and you have a better spread of AF points across the (cropped) frame. AF is also faster on the 1D X, thanks to the higher battery voltage.
> ...



although it comes out as a draw, I would not have been surprised if the 7D2 had been delivered with better AF than the 1DX.... after all, it is a newer camera... I would also be very surprised if the next revisions of the 5D3 and 1DX don't improve further from what we have now...


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## Keith_Reeder (Dec 3, 2014)

Marsu42 said:


> The grass is always greener on the other side



Except that it's _absolutely_ not, of course, for many of us.

Nothing Nikon does (and - hah! - _by an order of magnitude_, nothing Sony does), gets within a country mile of the 7D Mk II's capabilities _in the categories in which the 7D Mk II is intended to excel_.

This is a fact completely ignored by the bloody trolls and associated idiots that post on here kicking the camera _for not being a small mirrorless_: this is exactly like bitching about a BMW for not being much good at pulling a plough: it (the 7D Mk II) is what it is, and it's _extraordinarily_ good at the things it's meant to be good at.

Any Sony MILC user is welcome to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with me and try to compete when I shoot BIFs or MotoGP motorbikes with my 7D Mk II: _I'll tear you apart_.


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## AvTvM (Dec 3, 2014)

as far as DP-AF is concerned ... so far Canon has not been able to turn that feature into any really tangible benefiot for users. To the best of ma knowledge, both 70 as well as 7D II are still rather on the slow end of the bunch when it comes to autofocussing in Live View. Nowhere near where a Sony A6000 or Fuji XT-1 are. 

I am asking myself, whether there is real value in DP-AF technology and Canon just not able and/or willing to unleash t, or whether its basically a "dud innovation".


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## Don Haines (Dec 3, 2014)

Keith_Reeder said:


> Marsu42 said:
> 
> 
> > The grass is always greener on the other side
> ...


+1

and the torture test is to track a chickadee in flight through the branches of a tree....


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## Marsu42 (Dec 3, 2014)

Keith_Reeder said:


> Nothing Nikon does (and - hah! - _by an order of magnitude_, nothing Sony does), gets within a country mile of the 7D Mk II's capabilities _in the categories in which the 7D Mk II is intended to excel_.



Correct, that's why the reviews about the 7d2 are so positive (unlike the 70d, as far as I've read). But Canon has really worked hard on their conservative image during the last years, it won't change overnight.



Keith_Reeder said:


> This is a fact completely ignored by the bloody trolls and associated idiots that post on here kicking the camera _for not being a small mirrorless_: this is exactly like bitching about a BMW for not being much good at pulling a plough: it (the 7D Mk II) is what it is, and it's _extraordinarily_ good at the things it's meant to be good at.



I agree that being mirrorless in itself is not much of an achievement - it's about the potential benefits that come with being mirrorless. However, at the current state of the development it's probably not possible to achieve what the 7d2 does with on-sensor af.



AvTvM said:


> I am asking myself, whether there is real value in DP-AF technology and Canon just not able and/or willing to unleash t, or whether its basically a "dud innovation".



Canon keeps tweaking dpaf with each new iteration, starting from the Rebel 600d back then with just a few phase pixels.

But it would be interesting to know why the competition has faster live view af (if they have) - better software, faster cpu, dedicated hardware for contrast af? In any case, the additional benefit of the phase pixels should be a helper, not a hindrance.

Or probably we're all in the dark and the real benefit of the dpaf will only show up on upcoming cameras that have a digic and fw that make use of the tech, for example for better tracking in live view?


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## Lee Jay (Dec 3, 2014)

jrista said:


> The problem with ISO 1600 and up is you are SEVERELY limited in dynamic range. I already explained this, but at higher ISO, you suffer from star clipping. The benefit of the D810 would be that you could use it at ISO 100, and STILL have ~3e- RN.



I may be missing something, but it seems to me that 4 1-minute subs at ISO 1600 and RN of 2.8 is the same as 1 4 minute sub at ISO 400 and a RN of 1.4 (no additional highlight clipping, read noise averages out if it doesn't contain pattern noise and dark current, if it does, bias and flats can help remove them). Further, 16 1-minute subs at ISO 1600 and a RN of 2.8 is the same as 1 16 minute sub at ISO 100 and a RN of 0.7. It also seems to me that sky fog statistics are going to be the limiting factor in most cases, and in light-polluted skies it's easy to get sky fog way above RN.


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## AvTvM (Dec 3, 2014)

Don Haines said:


> Keith_Reeder said:
> 
> 
> > ...
> ...



provided, you put the 7D II into live view mode ... I would be game to try it ... using a Samsung NX-1 or a Sony A6000. ;D 8)


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## Don Haines (Dec 3, 2014)

AvTvM said:


> Don Haines said:
> 
> 
> > Keith_Reeder said:
> ...


So you think a test of the 7D2 AF system with the 7D2 AF system disabled is a fair test?

One compares the two cameras the way they were intended to be used, not crippled to match another unit.....

That's a lot like me having a car with an 8 speed transmission and you having a car with a 3 speed transmission and we take them out to race on the salt flats, but I can only use the first 3 gears.... totally meaningless!


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## Lee Jay (Dec 3, 2014)

AvTvM said:


> Don Haines said:
> 
> 
> > Keith_Reeder said:
> ...



Fair enough, as long as you put the NX-1 or A6000 into TTL/OVF mode for the second test.


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## neuroanatomist (Dec 3, 2014)

AvTvM said:


> Don Haines said:
> 
> 
> > Keith_Reeder said:
> ...



Afraid your beloved MILCs can't compete once the 7DII's mirror starts slapping up and down?


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## Marsu42 (Dec 3, 2014)

neuroanatomist said:


> The 70D got the 7D's AF (after three generations of the 40D's AF), and was the first camera to have dual-pixel AF. So...nothing new there. :



This is clever marketing indeed, and as the primary Canon advocate you make optimal use of it. So basically, for a successful camera release, do a lot of nothing for some years, then trickle down a 5 year old design, remove features (like spot af) and *tada* it's a leap forward :->

As for dpaf, yes, that's "new" as far as specs go, but aren't you the one always pointing out that specs don't mean a thing if the system doesn't deliver? If Sony/Nikon would have added a "nice tech and somewhat faster, but still slow" feature, would have it been seen as an advancement from us Canon enthusiasts? Well, I don't see the decisive real world advancement of this dpaf vs. the older hybrid lv designs for stills shooting yet.



neuroanatomist said:


> Did the 16-35/4L IS appeal to a few stills photographers? Or has no one mentioned wanting a corner-to-corner-sharp UWA zoom?



Thanks, I've forgotten this, Canon has indeed released some nice zooms lately! Please bookmark this post as my positive Canon praise of the day - I am in danger of getting the "whatever you say has to be a minority opinion, because if it wouldn't be Canon would have done so" treatment


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## ritholtz (Dec 3, 2014)

Lee Jay said:


> jrista said:
> 
> 
> > Read noise is the worst kind of noise for astrophotography. Without it, we could get amazing results with really basic mounts, without guiding, no one would care what their mounts PE was. The 7D II improves some things...but it still has Canon's same old high read noise. Elimination of banding is certainly a plus, and reduction in dark current is still a plus, but RN is STILL their limiting factor.
> ...


Checked out Sensorgen which has lot of statistics for every model. Surprising rebels with 18mpx sensor, are also good in terms of RN at iso 1600. Canon improved saturation number significantly on 70D compared to 7D. They improved further on 7D2. Unfortunately RN numbers at low ISO went up on 70D and 7D2. Not sure what happened there. Otherwise, we could have seen improvement in DR number for low ISO as well on new 20mpx sensor. 
Not sure how accurate are these numbers. If you check 600d saturation number, which is higher than every other camera with 18mpx sensor. Even higher than 7D. May be that is the reason 600d so much popular and Canon kept on making them.


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## JohnDizzo15 (Dec 3, 2014)

AvTvM said:


> as far as DP-AF is concerned ... so far Canon has not been able to turn that feature into any really tangible benefiot for users. To the best of ma knowledge, both 70 as well as 7D II are still rather on the slow end of the bunch when it comes to autofocussing in Live View. Nowhere near where a Sony A6000 or Fuji XT-1 are.
> 
> I am asking myself, whether there is real value in DP-AF technology and Canon just not able and/or willing to unleash t, or whether its basically a "dud innovation".



I have both the X-T1 and 70D. The 70D is not slow comparatively. It is actually just about as fast as far as when they both lock on. The issue for me with the Fuji is that it hunts when you don't expect it to. Same with the A7r when I had it (for what it's worth). DPAF has been much more reliable in my experiences with both cameras in various lighting situations. Comparing DPAF to any mirrorless camera I've had, it is much more consistent and reliable while being competitively fast.


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## Marauder (Dec 3, 2014)

Don Haines said:


> AvTvM said:
> 
> 
> > Don Haines said:
> ...



I was going to use the word "silly" but meaningless works too! LOL


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## LetTheRightLensIn (Dec 3, 2014)

Do keep in mind that his 'very' extensive sensor review basically skips over 50% of the stuff that people have most often found fault with Canon sensors over the last near decade. He did cover banding, which is much improved, but didn't really get into low ISO DR and totally glossed that Canon bugaboo over completely.

It is great to see it's super polished up for astro high iso long exposure and regarding banding though. 

But it's a bit disingenuous that he totally ignores what most of the sensor complaint talk on the net is about and tries to play it off as if it was just poor exposure in low light and such and for this site to then go on and make it sound as if it's the all-around every which way best sensor ever made by anyone.


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## racebit (Dec 3, 2014)

AvTvM said:


> as far as DP-AF is concerned ... so far Canon has not been able to turn that feature into any really tangible benefiot for users. To the best of ma knowledge, both 70 as well as 7D II are still rather on the slow end of the bunch when it comes to autofocussing in Live View. Nowhere near where a Sony A6000 or Fuji XT-1 are.
> 
> I am asking myself, whether there is real value in DP-AF technology and Canon just not able and/or willing to unleash t, or whether its basically a "dud innovation".



+1000


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## LetTheRightLensIn (Dec 3, 2014)

ritholtz said:


> Lee Jay said:
> 
> 
> > jrista said:
> ...



Something is wrong with most of the sensorgen data. When they put the site up again something got garbled with teh data translation. I mean they have some old nikon DSLR that have better than 100% photon collection efficiency ;D :.


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## Jack Douglas (Dec 3, 2014)

People, myself included, always come with biases. 

Mentioned earlier - many seem to be thankful the 7DII comes with the display buttons to the left. 

Correct me if I'm wrong but I use the 40D a little and after having used the 6D a lot, it is a total irritation to not be able to keep my left hand comfortably supporting a heavy long lense while quickly reviewing a shot. The 6D layout isn't perfect but for reviewing shots and even deleting them it's quite easy with just a thumb. Yet, those with the 5DIII, want uniformity and as a consequence don't want what I'm calling an improvement.

In other words, there is a tendency to want what you are familiar with, not what is actually better. 

Jack


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## sdsr (Dec 3, 2014)

TLN said:


> .... 7d2 ... is not a revolution of technology, so its hardly a gme changer.
> 
> But a7 is.
> First ff mirrorles. Yep i know about leica, but its too exotic and pricey
> ...



Disputing the meaning of "game changer" seems pointless to me (and regardless of whether it qualifies, I have no doubt the 7DII is excellent for what it is), but regardless of that I'm very partial to the Sony a7 line myself - I've owned an a7r for almost a year, was impressed by the a7s I recently rented, and am tempted by the a7II. However, to say that "they can easily use canon lenses with af" is highly misleading. On these bodies AF doesn't work at all with some Canon lenses (and may not work at all for most third party Canon-mount lenses), and when it does, while accurate (no AFMA required), it's slow - so slow that it's useless on anything that isn't essentially motionless. Much of the time mf is faster (though mf just works better with lenses designed for mf rather than af). 

So far, these cute little Sonys seem to me to serve a fairly specific range of people - those prefer small camera bodies, prefer mirrorless, don't need long/fast lenses and aren't much interested in sport/BIF photography and/or prefer using old (or indeed, any) manual focus lenses. I have no idea how big that range is (it does include me...), but it may be rather small, esp. the mf lens subcategory.

As for Canon ripping us off (as someone put it) by putting IS in lenses only, just how much cheaper would the already cheap 10-18mm lens be without it? Does anyone know what proportion of the price of the 24/28/35 IS primes is attributable to IS? I wish every Canon EF/EF-S lens had it....


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## CaptainZero (Dec 3, 2014)

racebit said:


> AvTvM said:
> 
> 
> > as far as DP-AF is concerned ... so far Canon has not been able to turn that feature into any really tangible benefiot for users. To the best of ma knowledge, both 70 as well as 7D II are still rather on the slow end of the bunch when it comes to autofocussing in Live View. Nowhere near where a Sony A6000 or Fuji XT-1 are.
> ...



Do you guys (or anyone else) really use live view that often? Do you ever shoot outside, when it's bright out? And don't even get me started if you like polarized sunglasses. 8)


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## Isaac Grant (Dec 3, 2014)

Jack Douglas said:


> People, myself included, always come with biases.
> 
> Mentioned earlier - many seem to be thankful the 7DII comes with the display buttons to the left.
> 
> ...



I have not read this whole thread so forgive me if I missed something, but as to this is easily fixed with the 7dii by using the custom functions and making the SET button the image palyback button. I have mine set to be image playback with 2x. This way you can leave the left hand where it is and still review your images.


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## racebit (Dec 3, 2014)

CaptainZero said:


> racebit said:
> 
> 
> > AvTvM said:
> ...



I use live view for manual lenses, where most of my money is.
DPAF does not work with manual lenses or telescopes.
DPAF does not work with non-Canon lenses, and not even all Canon lenses.
DPAF does not assist AFMA.
Therefore DPAF is useless to me.


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## Don Haines (Dec 3, 2014)

racebit said:


> CaptainZero said:
> 
> 
> > racebit said:
> ...


DPAF works with all my Canon lenses.
DPAF works with the Tamron 150-600, Sigma 30F1.4, and Sigma 10-22 (all my non-Canon lenses)

If you shoot movies with your 7D2, you will notice that the AF really does track moving objects, unlike previous cameras like the 60D

For me, it is useful.


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## Jack Douglas (Dec 4, 2014)

Isaac Grant, good point and since I'm toying with getting the camera, that's personally helpful. Thanks.

Jack


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## Roger N Clark (Dec 4, 2014)

First Post.

I would like to clarify a few things about my review and the comments made in this thread. There seems to be a lot of emphasis on dynamic range and read noise.

In long exposure photography with digital cameras (not cooled scientific cameras), there are generally 3 factors that impact detecting faint signals:
1) noise from dark current
2) adequately digitizing the low end
3) pattern noise
4) in night sky photography: airglow (light from the night sky)

Note read noise and dynamic range are not factors.

No camera is perfect. Sony's do lossy compression of the raw data, which creates artifacts (a web search will find examples) and limits pulling up shadows and faint astrophoto signals. Nikon clips the low end but that can be gotten around. Canon traditionally has had banding issues.

In astro and nightscape photography, if you are exposing where read noise is a limiting factor, you are simply practicing poor methodology. The general guideline is to expose long enough/fast enough lenses to get noise from the sky above read noise. Indeed, this is not difficult. Thus, read noise is a non issue. Noise from airglow when trying to record faint deep sky objects is a major limiting factor. In the example Horsehead nebula I posted, the faintest signals from the deep sky were coming in at less than 1 photon per minute. I know of no other consumer digital camera that can do better than that. If there is please show me evidence and I will buy one. See:
http://www.clarkvision.com/galleries/gallery.astrophoto-1/web/horsehead.rclark.c11.22.2014.0J6A1680-1750-sugav70.f-bin4x4s.html

In all long exposure photography of more than a few seconds of exposure, noise from dark current is a factor unless extremely cold, that is until the 7D2 came along. If you are doing 30-second night scenes of a city for example, unless it is very cold, noise from dark current will be greater than read noise.

Some in this thread advocated doing astrophotography at low iso to avoid blowing out bright stars. A fine strategy if you don't care about the low end. The problem at low ISOs is that the digitization steps are too large to record the very faintest stuff, meaning quantization noise becomes a factor. These are analog systems and to record the very faintest stuff (the usual desire in astrophotos), one should work at an iso that is about 0.3 or lower gain (electrons/data number, or e/DN). For the 7D2, than means ISO 800 or more. (Note the e/DN is really an inverse gain--that's the way electronics engineers started defining it years ago). DN is one integer interval in the analog to digital converter.

So to detect faint signals and record the best detail in that faint signal, whether low light astro photo, or shadow detail in a very dark shadow, it is best to work at an iso that adequately digitizes that low end, and that is NOT at low iso, whether canon, nikon, sony, or whomever. It has nothing to do with read noise.

Pattern noise. Canon has been pretty bad at that, but has vastly improved over the last few years, now best with the 7d2. Nikon hides some of their pattern noise by clipping the low end. I'll have a D800e review up soon (month or so). At low ISO, some 86% of D800e pixels are zeroed. Plus Nikon runs a median filter. Do the same thing with Canon data and, surprise, the dynamic range can be increased more than a stop. The Nikon methodology seems ugly to me from a science standpoint, but it produces amazing results in pleasing images and boosts dynamic range measurements that ignore that fact. Do the same thing with canon and see similar amazing results. Note the D810 clips at zero and then adds an offset, which because many low end values are artificially made the same, produces better low end noise numbers if that fact is not caught.

The internet is abuzz over dynamic range at low iso and canon's "poor" performance in that area. Yes, canon remains low in this regard, but higher dynamic range at the high end where dynamic range is shrinking and thus more important for high iso photographers. They key is one can make great photos with any system, and if one knows the weaknesses (and they ALL have weaknesses), then one can compensate for known weaknesses in real world imaging.

To help people reading my reviews, I am working on a how to interpret the information in my reviews. I'll have it up in a few days.

A final point. If the internet DR is everything poeple had a point about dynamic range being such a problem they (and DXO Mark) seem to think it is, there could never have been a decent image made with slide film and its 5 to 7 stops of DR. That is obviously not true. Modern DSLRs have impressive dynamic range and if one can't make a good image with 10 stops of DR, I'm sorry, but that is saying more about the photographer than the camera.

Roger Clark
http://www.clarkvision.com/


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## Lee Jay (Dec 4, 2014)

Roger, this article might interest you and others.

http://www.starrywonders.com/snr.html


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## jrista (Dec 4, 2014)

Roger N Clark said:


> In all long exposure photography of more than a few seconds of exposure, noise from dark current is a factor unless extremely cold, that is until the 7D2 came along. If you are doing 30-second night scenes of a city for example, unless it is very cold, noise from dark current will be greater than read noise.




I believe the dark current in Exmor sensors is some of the lowest out there outside of CCD sensors (and Sony CCD sensors have an order of magnitude lower dark current than the well established KAF CCD sensors, 0.003e-/px/s @ -10C vs. 0.02e-/px/s @ -15 to -20C). Current Exmor designs (i.e. A7s) seem to use both analog and digital CDS, and in testing they come fairly close to CCD level quality as far as overall noise levels and dark current noise levels (that was based on testing with a D800 that had been hacked with the black point hack.) 

It would be very nice if you could test some Exmor cameras yourself. I much prefer your testing and reports over anything else out there, including DXO. I've been bummed that you have continued to stick to only testing Canon cameras despite the prolific expansion of Exmor sensors into an increasing percentage of the market over the last few years. It would be nice to have a broader and more diverse source of test data from you specifically, something that can be more readily compared with your existing Canon tests, rather than having to make assumptions about how other sources of data may relate to yours.



Roger N Clark said:


> Some in this thread advocated doing astrophotography at low iso to avoid blowing out bright stars. A fine strategy if you don't care about the low end. The problem at low ISOs is that the digitization steps are too large to record the very faintest stuff, meaning quantization noise becomes a factor. These are analog systems and to record the very faintest stuff (the usual desire in astrophotos), one should work at an iso that is about 0.3 or lower gain (electrons/data number, or e/DN). For the 7D2, than means ISO 800 or more. (Note the e/DN is really an inverse gain--that's the way electronics engineers started defining it years ago). DN is one integer interval in the analog to digital converter.



I agree that quantization noise could be an issue. However read noise and dark current are so low in cameras with Exmor sensors, which makes it easier to expose the darker part of the signal well above the read noise floor. At lower ISOs, you can expose well above the read noise floor and still not clip the signal, improving per-sub SNR along the way, which gives you plenty of room to push the signal around without data burnout when stretching, reducing noise, and otherwise processing.

In my practical experience, even though you do encounter some issues with quantization noise, those issues pale in comparison to the issues with overall Canon read noise, banding in particular but the blotchy color artifacts as well, both of which Canon RAW images are famous for. It isn't just the amount of noise that can be a problem, it's how it presents, it's characteristic. Canon noise is far less clean and has non-random aspects than the noise that comes from Exmor based cameras, and even the noise from the D5200 (which uses the Toshiba sensor). I am currently working with some Samsung NX1 data, and the quality of the noise is phenomenal and lower than the 7D II, whereas the 7D II data which I am also working with is still heavily color blotched and has some rather strong horizontal banding. (I'll see if I can share the data sometime soon here...but in the grand scheme of things, the 7D II data does not appear to have improved much over past Canon cameras.) 



Roger N Clark said:


> So to detect faint signals and record the best detail in that faint signal, whether low light astro photo, or shadow detail in a very dark shadow, it is best to work at an iso that adequately digitizes that low end, and that is NOT at low iso, whether canon, nikon, sony, or whomever. It has nothing to do with read noise.



To detect faint signals, expose longer. 


I've recently been in some very lengthy and detailed discussions about noise in general, read noise and dark current specifically, in astrophotography with a bunch of other (some very skilled) astrophotographers. Given all the math (Lee Jay posted a link to one of the handy pages we've been referencing), longer exposures are by far the best way to solve the problem of recording faint detail. More specifically, exposing to the point where photon shot noise of the faintest details just barely swamp read noise. Most of the experimental data we've worked with is actually from CCD cameras, where read noise levels are usually between 5e- and 10e-, which is actually higher than testing often indicates DSLRs have at ISO settings above 400 or 800. 

The most common recommendations you are likely to find as far as exposing narrow band images is about 20 minutes. In actual testing, to increase the SNR enough to reveal very faint detail above the read noise floor, exposures as high as 55-90 minutes have been used (depending on the filter, with a 3-5nm Ha filter you can obviously get away with shorter exposures than a 5nm OIII filter, simply given the overall photon flux for those bands.) 

Similar testing revealed that much longer exposures than are commonly recommended for OSC/DSLR cameras should be used to increase SNR and reveal faint detail above the read+dark current noise floor, assuming you have actually reached the read noise floor in a DSLR (in the case of Canon cameras, that is usually ISO 400 for APS-C, ISO 800 for FF.) Most beginners will expose a mere 2-3 minutes at most, and then wonder why their images are so noisy (regardless of camera brand used.) When you push exposure much farther, beyond five minutes, even beyond 10 minutes, then you start to see the signal strength itself, including those fainter details, begin to reveal themselves...even with a DSLR at non-cold temperatures with the higher dark current. (Side note: Depending on light pollution levels and use (or more accurately lack thereof) of light pollution filtration, 2-3 minutes may be all you CAN expose...which changes the restrictions, skyfog/LP levels, and therefor goals, and thus changes the whole discussion.)

My current project, wide field Orion's Sword with the 5D III+EF 600/4 II+Astronomik CLS-XL, using 480s, 300s, 90s and 15s exposures at ISO 400 (dithered, calibrated with a 200-frame master bias and 30-frame master flat along with the cosmetic corrections for hot and cold pixels in DSS), has revealed a lot of the very faint outer dust regions. This image below is just 1 hours worth of 300s exposures (out of my minimum goal of 6 hours), with sensor temperatures around 12-16°C gathered during the dark late waning/new moon phases:







The outer detail is rather noisy, as it's still buried in the noise floor (I presume primarily dark current/dark current noise, given the sensor temperatures). I had to perform some extensive color noise reduction and debanding to get it as clean as it is. Hence the reason for the newer 8 minute exposures...however all of the brighter stars and many of the medium sized stars are clipped already in the 5 minute exposures (or so close to clipping that they burn out when processing).

I also grabbed a handful of 10 minute exposures, however that did not seem to reveal any additional faint detail, although it did slightly improve the SNR of that faint detail. It primarily increased the amount of clipping in my brighter stars even more, to the point I found it completely unacceptable. Given the amount of noise overall, and the amount of color noise, I would much prefer to take the quantization noise and use an Exmor at ISO 100 or 200, avoid clipping the stars entirely, and get even longer exposures...say 12 minutes. I think in the end, based on my experience with a couple integrations from D5100s, the results would be far cleaner in the outer dark nebula regions. (Granted...that's anecdotal, and I don't really have the right to share the data without the consent of the owners...but as far as my own experiences influencing my own choices, there you have it.) 

As a side note, since I did bring up the use of ISO 100/200 on Exmor-based cameras as a means of avoiding clipped stars. I recently started using the HDRCompostion tool in PixInsight, along with the MaskedStretch tool after linear processing. The image above I believe is actually a composition of my 300s and 90s exposures. HDRComposition with a set of decreasing exposure-length integrations, and MaskedStretch, along with very high precision 32-bit IEEE float FITS data, should help preserve the star detail and avoid blowing them out. Masked stretch can have an odd effect on stars...giving them a somewhat unnatural falloff into the background, but I guess I'll have to see if that is preferential to heavily blown out larger stars from 480-600 second exposures. As is usually the case, there are options to deal with camera limitations in post. If I had the option, I'd still use a D800 at ISO 100 or 200, take even longer exposures, and maybe even still do HDRComposition...just with fewer sets of exposures. (Why? Because it takes a really freaking LOOOONG time to get all that data in the first place!  Many days, sometimes spanning a couple of months, depending on the weather. Anything I can do to lessen the amount of time I have to spend pointing my camera at the sky gathering data when your talking about getting dozens if not hundreds of many-minute long exposures is extremely valuable, IMO.)


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## dufflover (Dec 4, 2014)

Why do so many people including reviewers seem to pretend the 70D doesn't exist or is really really new by always comparing it against the 7D just to make it look that much newer and better?

(for the record I really like my 70D - it's just this almost goggles view to compare it with the 5yr old model instead and then say it's new ...)


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## AvTvM (Dec 4, 2014)

it is done to show a "whopping" 14% improvement of 7D II sensor vs. 5 year old 7D sensor ... and call it "*game changing*". ;D



dufflover said:


> Why do so many people including reviewers seem to pretend the 70D doesn't exist or is really really new by always comparing it against the 7D just to make it look that much newer and better?
> (for the record I really like my 70D - it's just this almost goggles view to compare it with the 5yr old model instead and then say it's new ...)


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## AvTvM (Dec 4, 2014)

@Roger: thanks for your continued, scientific and objective testing ... and the post. 
@jrista: also thank you for your continued, insightful and knowledge-based posts. Plus the great pics! 

However .. and respectfully ... while there obviously are improvements Canon managed to achieve in the 7D2 sensor vs. really old previous sensor designs ... to me they still don't appear nowhere near "game changing". Some improvements, new iteration of Canon's APS-C sensor design, yes. But game changing? No. AT least not outside astrophotography. In all image examples and reviews I have seen so far, I could not detect any "game-changing sensor-related improvements" in the 7D2 that show themselves in 99% of its intended usage ... action, sports, wildlife, planes and birds in flight, and any "general photographic use cases".

To me, the 7D2 sensor is still behind competitor's APS-C sensors. Sony/Nikon and Samsung. Less resolution, not quite as good low ISO DR not quite as good noise across the board. 

Personally ... I would not mind at all, if "zero" values at the bottom were clipped, if that's indeed one of the tricks, Sony/Nikon cameras apply to improve DR.


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## jrista (Dec 4, 2014)

I am still not convinced the 7D II is anything game changing for astrophotography. Within the scope of Canon cameras specifically, I have no doubt that Roger Clark's information, and his assertion that the 7D II has the lowest dark current *of any Canon camera so far*, is true.


What I doubt is that the 7D II is better, either in general or specifically in the case of dark current, than any competitors, for astrophotography. I believe the 7D II, like the 7D before it, has it's unique features and strengths. It just doesn't have any significant improvement in IQ. Certainly nothing game changing.


I have been given access to some NX1 and 7D II data tonight. The difference is night and day once you get into the shadows. The NX1 has far cleaner noise, no banding that I can see, and much more dynamic range. The 7D II has pronounced horizontal banding. I was hoping that at the very least the 7D II would just have random read noise...the presence of the horizontal banding is extremely dismaying to me. The classic Canon color blotch is still there, in full force, as well...which was also dismaying. I do not see any significant difference between the point at which the 7D II read noise stops shadow recovery, and the point at which the same occurs with the 5D III (same kind of data, same step wedge as we saw recently here on these forms.)


Given what I'm seeing, it is not surprising that the 7D II has a mere 0.2 stops more DR than the 5D III according to sensorgen data. That is a difference that is barely within the margin of human perception, and in my own perception with this data stretched in PixInsight, that seems to be dead on.


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## Woody (Dec 4, 2014)

Is there any data on the Samsung NX1 dynamic range? I have not seen any.


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## Don Haines (Dec 4, 2014)

dufflover said:


> Why do so many people including reviewers seem to pretend the 70D doesn't exist or is really really new by always comparing it against the 7D just to make it look that much newer and better?
> 
> (for the record I really like my 70D - it's just this almost goggles view to compare it with the 5yr old model instead and then say it's new ...)



Because it's even stupider when you say that the 7D2 is 2 percent better and try to justify that 2% as a ground breaking innovative game changing paradigm shift that completely changes photography as we know it.

I have shot for many years with a 60D... identical IQ to the 7D... A friend got the 70D and you could barely tell any difference. I have a 7D2 and it is hard to see any difference over the 60D until you go to high ISO. The AF system is an order of magnitude better, but you have to pixel peek and still won't see any significant difference in IQ for normal use.

As digital cameras mature, you will see less and less difference in IQ between revisions... everyone is approaching a wall.


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## Bundu (Dec 4, 2014)

jrista said:


> The 7D II has pronounced horizontal banding. I was hoping that at the very least the 7D II would just have random read noise...the presence of the horizontal banding is extremely dismaying to me.


I really want to try/start astro photography. I have a 7DmarkII. When do this banding occur and how do I prevent/minimalise it?
Thank you for all the info.


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## East Wind Photography (Dec 4, 2014)

Bundu said:


> jrista said:
> 
> 
> > The 7D II has pronounced horizontal banding. I was hoping that at the very least the 7D II would just have random read noise...the presence of the horizontal banding is extremely dismaying to me.
> ...



You can only minimize it and other effects by taking shorter exposures, taking dark frames, and staking using something like Starstax or other application that can stack multiple sub exposures to enhance signal to noise.

ie; 60 ten second exposures will produce better results than a single 600 second exposure.


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## djrocks66 (Dec 4, 2014)

As much as I like my 7DMKII, it's sensor is still pretty much the same as the rest of the crop cameras Canon has made Since the T2i-7D. Yes the High ISO noise is improved a little and the dual pixel for video is cool but it's image quality and amount of recoverable information in the Raw files is pretty much the same. I would not be happy if I had to shoot Landscapes with this camera only. I bought it for Wildlife and will probably just keep a 400mm mounted to it. Yes the AF and tracking is amazing. My 16MP Fuji X-T1 produces so much better files then the 7D in every way. If Canon would put a Sony sensor in their DSLR's I would be so happy. As far as a body, performance, menu and functionality camera I think it is Canons best one yet. ( for the money ) But game changer? Nah. It is what it is. A great Sports or Wildlife camera. If it had a Sony sensor or a real newly designed one that had the Dynamic Range of the Sony sensors it would be a Game Changer ( yes I said dynamic range because that is important to the type of shooting I do ) I'm not saying you can't shoot anything else with this camera, because you can, I am just disappointed that Canon is not pushing their sensor tech to improve dynamic range. Even if you don't agree with the whole Dynamic Range argument it is a big discussion on every photography forum. Maybe one day Canon will listen. Just my opinion of course.


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## Roger N Clark (Dec 4, 2014)

East Wind Photography said:


> Bundu said:
> 
> 
> > jrista said:
> ...



Avoiding banding in astrophotography is easy. See my review and then my post processing:
http://www.clarkvision.com/reviews/evaluation-canon-7dii/
http://www.clarkvision.com/articles/night.photography.image.processing/
Use ISO 1600.

My astrophoto and nightscape images made with the 7D Mark II, as well as other recent canon cameras have had no dark frames, no flats, just a simple raw conversion align and average (astrophotos), or simple raw conversion and mosaic (nightscapes).
There is no need for bias, dark frames, or flats (with profiled lenses) with modern digital cameras of the last few years.

Roger


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## Lee Jay (Dec 4, 2014)

djrocks66 said:


> As much as I like my 7DMKII, it's sensor is still pretty much the same as the rest of the crop cameras Canon has made Since the T2i-7D. Yes the High ISO noise is improved a little and the dual pixel for video is cool but it's image quality and amount of recoverable information in the Raw files is pretty much the same. I would not be happy if I had to shoot Landscapes with this camera only. I bought it for Wildlife and will probably just keep a 400mm mounted to it. Yes the AF and tracking is amazing. My 16MP Fuji X-T1 produces so much better files then the 7D in every way. If Canon would put a Sony sensor in their DSLR's I would be so happy. As far as a body, performance, menu and functionality camera I think it is Canons best one yet. ( for the money ) But game changer? Nah. It is what it is. A great Sports or Wildlife camera. If it had a Sony sensor or a real newly designed one that had the Dynamic Range of the Sony sensors it would be a Game Changer ( yes I said dynamic range because that is important to the type of shooting I do ) I'm not saying you can't shoot anything else with this camera, because you can, I am just disappointed that Canon is not pushing their sensor tech to improve dynamic range. Even if you don't agree with the whole Dynamic Range argument it is a big discussion on every photography forum. Maybe one day Canon will listen. Just my opinion of course.



When I looked at the 7DII raw data from ISO 100-12,800, and compared it to the 18MP sensor, I saw substantially improved detail at low ISO (more than would be expected from the small pixel count increase), and more than one stop of improved performance at high ISO (can be as much as two stops depending on processing and ISO). Low ISO DR seems pretty much unchanged (and largely irrelevant to me).


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## jrista (Dec 4, 2014)

Bundu said:


> jrista said:
> 
> 
> > The 7D II has pronounced horizontal banding. I was hoping that at the very least the 7D II would just have random read noise...the presence of the horizontal banding is extremely dismaying to me.
> ...




The most effective way that I have found to manage banding, both vertical and horizontal, are some photoshop actions called Astronomy Tools. These scripts are the best debanding I have ever found, period, and there are some other very useful astro processing scripts (like Local Contrast Enhancement, star reduction, increase star color, and others) in this set as well. More than worth the money.


http://www.prodigitalsoftware.com/Astronomy_Tools_For_Full_Version.html


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## jrista (Dec 4, 2014)

Woody said:


> Is there any data on the Samsung NX1 dynamic range? I have not seen any.




A am hoping to get some soon. Just waiting on some improved source images.


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## Bundu (Dec 4, 2014)

East Wind Photography said:


> Bundu said:
> 
> 
> > jrista said:
> ...


Thank you, I will take some photos of the night sky at different exposures to see at which exposures banding become a problem.


Roger N Clark said:


> East Wind Photography said:
> 
> 
> > Bundu said:
> ...


Thanks for all the info. I will study the above to use my camera properly. A lot to learn that's for sure. Luckily I am off on a three week holiday into Mozambique. Time enough to try a bit of everything.


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## Bundu (Dec 4, 2014)

I am going to need a tracking mount. Any recommendations? Not top of the line stuff, already spent way over budget on equipment this year. In fact the cheapest product that is proficient enough.


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## Lee Jay (Dec 4, 2014)

Bundu said:


> I am going to need a tracking mount. Any recommendations? Not top of the line stuff, already spent way over budget on equipment this year. In fact the cheapest product that is proficient enough.



That depends very strongly on the OTA and what you are going to do with it.


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## East Wind Photography (Dec 4, 2014)

Bundu said:


> I am going to need a tracking mount. Any recommendations? Not top of the line stuff, already spent way over budget on equipment this year. In fact the cheapest product that is proficient enough.



Yeah I agree. It depends on the weight of the rig, does it need to fit in a backpack or something you will use from home only or can transport in a car? Are you going to shoot deep space objects or wide star fields?

Cheap solutions can give you hours of frustration and not deliver what you expect.


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## Lee Jay (Dec 4, 2014)

East Wind Photography said:


> Bundu said:
> 
> 
> > I am going to need a tracking mount. Any recommendations? Not top of the line stuff, already spent way over budget on equipment this year. In fact the cheapest product that is proficient enough.
> ...



Or work perfectly great depending on what you're doing (i.e. planetary imaging or maybe star clusters versus faint fuzzies with a slow OTA).


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## Don Haines (Dec 4, 2014)

East Wind Photography said:


> Bundu said:
> 
> 
> > I am going to need a tracking mount. Any recommendations? Not top of the line stuff, already spent way over budget on equipment this year. In fact the cheapest product that is proficient enough.
> ...



This is about the minimum you can get away with.....

http://ca.skywatcher.com/_english/02_mounts/02_detail.php?sid=68


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## Bundu (Dec 4, 2014)

Don Haines said:


> East Wind Photography said:
> 
> 
> > Bundu said:
> ...


Looks great, and not too expensive!
Maybe I should rather ask this; what would you recommend me starting off with (deep space and/or wide star fields) taking into account the equipment I have - 70D, 7DII, 100-400L, ext 1.4III, 70-300, 15-85, 50 1.4, 60 2.8 macro. I am getting a 10-22 this weekend.
All will be transported by car - rough tracks - 4x4. We will be spending half our time in the bush where there is no light pollution and the stars is so bright it seems like you can touch them!
Thank you again for your input.


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## East Wind Photography (Dec 4, 2014)

Bundu said:


> Don Haines said:
> 
> 
> > East Wind Photography said:
> ...



This looks pretty good as it allows you to use your own stuff to reduce costs and extra stuff you need to travel with. Watch the weight. Very easy for a camera and lens to reach the max limit and cause the tracking motor to start slipping (best case) or break (worse case). Though the 100-400 is pretty light. 

I've not seen this mount but I may get one myself to play around with.


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## jrista (Dec 4, 2014)

East Wind Photography said:


> Bundu said:
> 
> 
> > jrista said:
> ...




You have to be careful with advice like this, as it is not simple and strait forward. Yes, stacking more subs can increase SNR, but SNR is not the only thing that matters. There are caveats here. 


First, there is SNR and there is Signal. A low signal can have a high SNR by reducing noise...but it's still a low signal. If you are not gathering data on dimmer nebulosity (or say outer galaxy halo), your simply not gathering it. You cannot make it appear out of nowhere, and even if you gather a photon per minute on the faintest details, you are going to need many hundreds of subs to average out noise enough to actually see those details. The only way to improve the strength of those dimmer details is to expose longer (or get a better camera with lower read noise, and cool it to obscenely cold temperatures).


Second, fixed pattern noise does not average out. Fixed bands (I have several on my 5D III), hot and cold pixels, these things are REINFORCED by stacking, not removed. The same goes for dust spots...if you do not take proper flats that have identical dust spots, they will be reinforced with stacking, becoming little "black holes" in your images. (So, I disagree with Roger here...DLSRs are quite good these days, but that has nothing to do with why we need flats, and if we use flats, we at the very least need to use biases.) There are ways of mitigating the reinforcement of noise artifacts. The use of dark frames is one. The use of dithering during imaging is another (although with DSLRs you have to be pretty aggressive due to the use of AA filters on most cameras...and that high aggression in dithering can lead to other problems.) Bias frames can also be used to remove the fixed pattern inherent in the sensor due to manufacturing, however this usually only reveals itself with very deep stretching. 


In the end, you have to decide what you want. Do you want a light exposure that just pulls out the brighter details, or do you want a deep exposure that pulls out the very faint details? If you want deeper exposures, then you need to expose longer. You could stack a hundred 60 second exposures, and that will reduce noise, but it will not increase the exposure, it will not increase the signal strength. It just makes the signal more complete. My first Orion image, here below, are 120 second exposures:









This was my second astro photo. There are a decent number of frames here, 30 of them to be exact. Noise was reduced a fair amount, however a lot of the fainter details are buried in the read noise and dark current. I know this, because I reprocessed it recently, and tried to pull out more detail:








I could take more exposures....60, 90. The problem with integrating sub frames is the more you integrate, the less an impact each frame has on improving signal. Integrate 30x, you reduce noise by a factor of ~5.5, integrate 100x you reduce noise by a factor of 10x (more than triple frames, less than double the reduction in noise), integrate 400x you reduce noise by a factor of 20x (four times the number of frames again, over 13x the number I originally started out with, to double the reduction in noise again.) The simple fact here is that I may eventually reveal some more of the faint details...but those details are going to have a very weak signal. They are going to suffer from quantization noise and posterization. 


There are guys who do something called lucky imaging, where they take countless very short exposures, then stack 500 or 1000 frames. They use cameras with EXCESSIVELY low noise (i.e. <1e-) at extremely cold temperatures (-55 to -70 degrees celsius below ambient), which is orders of magnitude lower than the best DSLRs on the market today. To achieve something similar with a DSLR, you would still need longer "short" exposures (say 15, 20, 30 seconds instead of 5 or 10), and you would need many thousands more, to reduce noise to levels low enough where you could actually see the fainter details.


You can integrate more and more and more data, and you get diminishing returns. No one integrates 400 2-minute exposures. Some guys with $20,000 EMCCD cameras integrate 1000 2-5 second exposures at -40C dT or colder. Most people simply expose longer to improve the SIGNAL, which concurrently improves the SNR of both the bright and faint parts of the object. You then still get a bunch of subs and integrate those to reduce noise and improve the SNR even more. You cannot simply reduce exposure time and hope to get the same results as longer exposures in astrophotography. You can improve the results of bright details, you are likely to not get dim details at all unless you integrate hundreds of frames.


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## Lee Jay (Dec 4, 2014)

jrista said:


> In the end, you have to decide what you want. Do you want a light exposure that just pulls out the brighter details, or do you want a deep exposure that pulls out the very faint details? If you want deeper exposures, then you need to expose longer. You could stack a hundred 60 second exposures, and that will reduce noise, but it will not increase the exposure, it will not increase the signal strength.



Yes, it will, by definition (exposure is illuminance time product).

From an exposure standpoint, one one-hour shot is the same as 3600 one-second shots. All the same light will be gathered.

There are diminishing returns with longer subs even when you account for the various noise sources.

http://www.starrywonders.com/basicgraph.jpg


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## East Wind Photography (Dec 4, 2014)

jrista said:


> East Wind Photography said:
> 
> 
> > Bundu said:
> ...



Great info here but I think you went 10000ft over everone's head. The original request was from someone just starting out. 

As you stated to get rid of some type of noise you have to take dark frames of the same exposure...and to get rid of dust you need white exposures that show the dust.


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## jrista (Dec 4, 2014)

Lee Jay said:


> jrista said:
> 
> 
> > In the end, you have to decide what you want. Do you want a light exposure that just pulls out the brighter details, or do you want a deep exposure that pulls out the very faint details? If you want deeper exposures, then you need to expose longer. You could stack a hundred 60 second exposures, and that will reduce noise, but it will not increase the exposure, it will not increase the signal strength.
> ...




Purely theoretically, yes. If you had a noise-free system, this is true. We do not have noise-free systems.


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## Lee Jay (Dec 4, 2014)

jrista said:


> Lee Jay said:
> 
> 
> > jrista said:
> ...



Right...that's why I said "from an exposure standpoint" and provided that plot that adds the effect of noise.


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## jrista (Dec 4, 2014)

Lee Jay said:


> jrista said:
> 
> 
> > Lee Jay said:
> ...




Sorry, didn't check the plot. I guess exposure was a bad word. The signal strength does not increase. Noise is reduced by averaging, but the strength of the signal remains the same. With digital systems, once your into detail that's buried in the read and dark current noise, you have a serious quantization noise problem. You could stack 3600 frames...but that faint detail is not going to be as detailed as it would be if you used the longest relevant exposure for your level of read noise. 


Going off your plot, I'd say stacking 15 minute exposures would be the idea. You maximize your signal strength in each sub, and can integrate fewer subs to average out the read noise and reveal the faintest details. Your going to get most of the detail above the noise floor, and exposed well enough that your not going to face quantization error issues.


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## Lee Jay (Dec 4, 2014)

jrista said:


> Sorry, didn't check the plot. I guess exposure was a bad word. The signal strength does not increase. Noise is reduced by averaging, but the strength of the signal remains the same.



No, the signal strength (the number of photons collected) does increase. That is, in fact, the main purpose of doing it.



> With digital systems, once your into detail that's buried in the read and dark current noise, you have a serious quantization noise problem.



Actually, you have a serious read and dark current noise problem.



> You could stack 3600 frames...but that faint detail is not going to be as detailed as it would be if you used the longest relevant exposure for your level of read noise.



Yes, that's the whole point of that plot.



> Going off your plot,



Not mine, by the way.



> I'd say stacking 15 minute exposures would be the idea.



No, you have to re-do that plot for your level of light pollution and for the noise of your camera and f-stop of your optics.


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## Bundu (Dec 4, 2014)

@jrista - thanks, but I think I will start at the basics and just try and get a few nice photo's first! Thereafter I will come knocking at your door again. If my fist photo is half as good as your first I will be mighty proud of myself.
@east wind - downloaded DeepSkyTracker a few days ago and yes, what you said

[As you stated to get rid of some type of noise you have to take dark frames of the same exposure...and to get rid of dust you need white exposures that show the dust.]

is about as much as I know at this point in time. But that is one of the great things about starting out, there is such a lot to learn.


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## Roger N Clark (Dec 4, 2014)

jrista said:


> Sorry, didn't check the plot. I guess exposure was a bad word. The signal strength does not increase. Noise is reduced by averaging, but the strength of the signal remains the same. With digital systems, once your into detail that's buried in the read and dark current noise, you have a serious quantization noise problem. You could stack 3600 frames...but that faint detail is not going to be as detailed as it would be if you used the longest relevant exposure for your level of read noise.
> 
> Going off your plot, I'd say stacking 15 minute exposures would be the idea. You maximize your signal strength in each sub, and can integrate fewer subs to average out the read noise and reveal the faintest details. Your going to get most of the detail above the noise floor, and exposed well enough that your not going to face quantization error issues.



There still seems to be a lot of confusion here. Accumulated total exposure time is proportional to the amount of light collected. So yes it is increasing with additional exposures. If photon noise limited (the situation most of the time in photography), signal-to-noise ratio goes up as the square root of the total exposure. In processing many sub-exposures, if you average, sub-exposures signal level stays the same and the noise floor is pushed down as the square root of the number of exposures averaged. If you add the sub-exposures signal increases linearly and noise increases as the square root. Simple math, but in either case signal-to-noise ratio increases with total exposure time.

Regarding dark frames, if you are new to this kind of photography, and have a relatively new camera, YOU DO NOT NEED DARK FRAMES. Modern digital cameras, circa 2008 or so and later have on sensor dark current suppression, so there is no dark current to remove with a dark frame. Canon cameras have another added feature if you would read my description here:
http://www.clarkvision.com/articles/night.photography.image.processing/
Before starting an imaging session, do a sensor clean. That also updates the hot/dead/stuck pixel list. Modern raw converters will then not include those pixels in the raw conversion. NO NEED FOR DARK FRAMES. Those how say you need dark frames are either using old technology or are clinging to old outdated and not needed methods that just makes things harder.

Flat fields are not needed if you are using profiled camera lenses. Certainly start with a clean sensor, but with the step above, you should have no dust spots and with fast lenses, dust spots don't really show. During raw conversion (e.g. photoshop ACR) simply select the lens profile and viola! the flat field is applied. Quick and simple. Again details in the above link.

With cameras like the 7D Mark 2, or 6D, there is no banding in extreme stretches from images at iso1600. Astrophiotography is simple and effective.

Regarding subs, people keep posting to a graph with 8.4 electron read noise. Not very relevant to modern DSLRs with read noise under 3 electrons with modern cameras, the plot is irrelevant.. A proper plot would show a steeper rise indicating that shorter subs work well.

For the person starting out, I suggest wide angle astrophotography. Follow my series in the link above. Use your 60 mm f/2.8 with either a barn door home made tracker, or iOptron (see my gear page).

15 minute exposure would saturate many stars and brighter parts of nebulae. The idea of low isos and 15 minutes exposures simply leads to quanitzation noise, loss of the low end faint signals, and saturated highlights. And with a fast lens even the sky would be overexposed. 

With a 60 mm f/2.8 lens on a 7D2, 1-minute subs at iso1600, you should be able to do much better than this from a dark sky:
http://www.clarkvision.com/galleries/gallery.astrophoto-1/web/orion.35mm.rnclark.c10.09.2013.C45I4598-613_61sec.avg14.g2-bin4x4s.html

Roger


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## jrista (Dec 4, 2014)

Lee Jay said:


> jrista said:
> 
> 
> > Sorry, didn't check the plot. I guess exposure was a bad word. The signal strength does not increase. Noise is reduced by averaging, but the strength of the signal remains the same.
> ...




Eh, I see what you are saying. With an analog signal, I think that could be possible (I don't process my images as analog signals). From another angle, averaging frames together doesn't increase the digital signal level...if you had a level in your brightest areas of say 13,000, and in the dimmest areas of 2, and your read noise level is around 7-15 with banding and color blotches, averaging reduces the noise (but enhances the banding), but the absolute levels of the _digital_ signal do not change. Once you average enough to reduce the read noise to an effectively meaningless level, the faintest parts of your signal are still going to have a digital level of 2, and any differences in level of the faint detail that should be revealed in neighboring pixels is going to be swamped by quantization noise...in other words, there is likely to be data in areas that end up looking like a largely continous and flat mass separated by sharp steps (posterization), rather than DETAIL. 


Assuming perfectly ideal circumstances, yes...your taking light collected across many subs and combining them together...you still collected the light. But it doesn't increase the amount of detail. So, theoretically correct...in practice I think there are things that work against this ideal. For one, quantization error. 

In addition, with shorter and shorter subs, you have an increasing ratio of dead time between frames where you are not collecting light. If you get one photon approx. every 6 seconds from the dim outer region of a nebula, and your taking 5 second subs with a two second delay between (for readout time), your going to miss the majority of those photons. You'll capture some, but fewer than if you have longer exposures. Thus, in practice, stacking 1200x1 subs is not as good as stacking 20x60 subs which is not as good as stacking 2x600 subs. The longer subs are going to be gathering more light in total, which isn't as meaningful for stronger parts of the signal, but could be hugely meaningful for the faintest parts of the signal. The lag time between subs is minimal when your taking fewer, longer subs. 




Lee Jay said:


> > With digital systems, once your into detail that's buried in the read and dark current noise, you have a serious quantization noise problem.
> 
> 
> 
> Actually, you have a serious read and dark current noise problem.




Sorry, I was unclear. If you average together 3600 short exposures, you'll average out a ton of the read noise and dark current, leaving behind a very faint signal that suffers from quantization error. It'll be posterized and flat, without much if any structure. That is an issue with quantization error, since you averaged out read noise.




Lee Jay said:


> > Going off your plot,
> 
> 
> 
> ...




Whoever's it is.  

But no, you misunderstood again. _For the plot you provided_, assuming _that_ read noise and _that_ skyfog level, a 12-15 minute exposure would get you ideal subs. You would waste the least amount of light (ignoring for now the fact that skyfog is useless light), maximize signal strength, minimize the amount of faint detail subject to quantization error, minimize the amount of subs you need to average to reduce read noise to the point where you can stretch that fainter detail and have clean results. 


Assuming that read noise and that skyfog level, I do not believe short exposures, say a matter of seconds, are going to give you the same results as 15 minute exposures, for all the reasons I stated at the top. You might produce a more _complete_ signal in the end, but since it is digital, your just making a lower level of detail smoother and less noisy...your not increasing detail. I see this problem with images from guys who use really short exposures with EMCCD cameras...they get REALLY smooth, clean images...but they lack the detail of longer exposure images. Even when a thousand or more subs are integrated...the signal gets really clean, but that's it. I guess one way to look at it is that longer exposures are like an in-camera detail-enhancing stretch.


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## Lee Jay (Dec 4, 2014)

jrista said:


> But no, you misunderstood again. _For the plot you provided_, assuming _that_ read noise and _that_ skyfog level, a 12-15 minute exposure would get you ideal subs. You would waste the least amount of light (ignoring for now the fact that skyfog is useless light), maximize signal strength, minimize the amount of faint detail subject to quantization error, minimize the amount of subs you need to average to reduce read noise to the point where you can stretch that fainter detail and have clean results.
> 
> 
> Assuming that read noise and that skyfog level, I do not believe short exposures, say a matter of seconds, are going to give you the same results as 15 minute exposures, for all the reasons I stated at the top. You might produce a more _complete_ signal in the end, but since it is digital, your just making a lower level of detail smoother and less noisy...your not increasing detail. I see this problem with images from guys who use really short exposures with EMCCD cameras...they get REALLY smooth, clean images...but they lack the detail of longer exposure images. Even when a thousand or more subs are integrated...the signal gets really clean, but that's it. I guess one way to look at it is that longer exposures are like an in-camera detail-enhancing stretch.



Huh...I would have chosen something in the knee of the curve, say, 2-4 minutes. That way, you get 90% of the SNR and have the lowest probability of having to throw out a long sub or three due to a gust of wind, an airplane or a satellite.


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## jrista (Dec 4, 2014)

Roger N Clark said:


> jrista said:
> 
> 
> > Sorry, didn't check the plot. I guess exposure was a bad word. The signal strength does not increase. Noise is reduced by averaging, but the strength of the signal remains the same. With digital systems, once your into detail that's buried in the read and dark current noise, you have a serious quantization noise problem. You could stack 3600 frames...but that faint detail is not going to be as detailed as it would be if you used the longest relevant exposure for your level of read noise.
> ...




Please see my latest answer. I think that will clear up some confusion about what I'm talking about. I agree, if you add, signal strength increases. I was talking about averaging, which keeps the signal strength, but reduces noise. In the case of the latter, I believe that imposes limitations on how much you can improve detail with continued averaging. You eventually end up with a wicked-clean signal, but that does not mean it is as detailed (i.e. it doesn't exhibit the finer fainter structures) as if you averaged fewer longer exposures which DO have a stronger signal. 




Roger N Clark said:


> Regarding dark frames, if you are new to this kind of photography, and have a relatively new camera, YOU DO NOT NEED DARK FRAMES. Modern digital cameras, circa 2008 or so and later have on sensor dark current suppression, so there is no dark current to remove with a dark frame. Canon cameras have another added feature if you would read my description here:
> http://www.clarkvision.com/articles/night.photography.image.processing/
> Before starting an imaging session, do a sensor clean. That also updates the hot/dead/stuck pixel list. Modern raw converters will then not include those pixels in the raw conversion. NO NEED FOR DARK FRAMES. Those how say you need dark frames are either using old technology or are clinging to old outdated and not needed methods that just makes things harder.



I disagree with this, just based on my practical experience with both the 7D and 5D III. Dark current is still high enough in DSLRs to be an issue. I can share some subs of mine where I had some wide swings in temperature. At the higher temperatures, the impact of dark signal and the accompanying dark signal noise, was very obvious. This was during summer, without a cold box, so sensor temperatures (which were higher than ambient) ranged from nearly 30C to over 40C. At lower temperatures such as we have now, you can see how the dark signal became a largely meaningless factor, but at 25, 35, 40C, you can clearly see the increase in noise.

There are still issues with dark current. Hot pixels still exist in modern cameras. I cannot speak for the 7D II, however the 5D III without a doubt has hot pixels, I've seen plenty of dark frames from the 6D showing hot pixels above about 10C, and more of them show up with an increase in temperature (for a given exposure length).

Beyond just hot pixels, there are other reasons to use dark frames. Again, based on my experience with the 5D III, I get a little bit of amplifier glow along the right-hand edge of my subs. It's pretty much impossible to remove with PixInsights background extraction tools, and Russel Croman's GradientXterminator does not seem to eliminate it either. The only way to really get rid of it is with dark frames. 


All that said, these days, I generally don't bother with dark frames. They are a royal PITA to deal with...what with them having to be temperature matched and all that. They can mitigate odd issues with the light frame signals, such as that amplifier glow, but there are other ways to deal with the most common issue with dark current, the hot pixels. These days, I dither. Using BackyardEOS, Sequence Generator Pro, MaxIm DL, you can hook into guiding software like PHD or MetaGuide and use that to move the scope in DEC and RA a little bit between each frame. That displaces the hot pixels in each frame, allowing sigma-clipping based algorithms (like the Winsorized Sigma Clipping used in PixInsights stacking script) to identify and reject the hot (and cold) pixels. 


So, while I agree that darks are not particularly necessary these days thanks to dithering, I do not believe that most current digital cameras are so free of dark current that it is entirely a non-issue. Maybe it's just a tolerance thing...I'm a bit of a perfectionist, and I don't want any hot pixels in my images. If you have a high tolerance for hot pixels, then maybe the dark current levels of current DSLRs is fine.


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## jrista (Dec 4, 2014)

Lee Jay said:


> jrista said:
> 
> 
> > But no, you misunderstood again. _For the plot you provided_, assuming _that_ read noise and _that_ skyfog level, a 12-15 minute exposure would get you ideal subs. You would waste the least amount of light (ignoring for now the fact that skyfog is useless light), maximize signal strength, minimize the amount of faint detail subject to quantization error, minimize the amount of subs you need to average to reduce read noise to the point where you can stretch that fainter detail and have clean results.
> ...




With sigma clipping algorithms, airplanes, satellites, cosmic ray hits, etc. are pretty easy to reject. You usually need more than 10 frames, but that's usually the case anyway. I live near an airport, and aside from the ludicrously low planes that cover a huge portion of the frame, I use the kappa-sigma clipping algorithm along with aggressive dithering for light frames to reject the streaks out. With really long exposures, say the 30-45 minutes (and sometimes even longer) I'm seeing guys do these days for OIII narrow band imaging on CCDs, multiple streaks from aircraft, meteors, satellites, etc. can end up in a single frame, and it can become more problematic. Most of them still don't seem to have that many problems when using a sigma clipping algorithm to integrate.



A gust of wind might be a problem. Depends on the mount...if your using something with absolute encoding and skymodeling, then wind is usually not a problem unless it is very strong and continuous. At smaller image scales, such as me at 2.1"/px, I can still absorb a good deal of wind without it showing up in my stars, and I am using the lowly Atlas as a mount. (That may partly be due to the fact that I usually have poor seeing, which bloats my stars anyways.) At a larger image scale, sure, wind is likely to be a problem. 


There is also the fact that it's the faint detail that you expose for (well, assuming you want to get as much faint detail as possible...maybe that isn't everyone's goal.) Were assuming that the whole object has a higher photon flux. That may not be the case. The photon flux of the bulk of a nebula might be up at 14e-/min, but the fainter outer detail is likely to be much lower...say ~2e-/min? I think about the faint detail. I can expose for the Trap in Orion in 15 seconds. I had to expose at least 5 minutes to get the faint outer detail just barely above the read noise (and at that long of an exposure, there was dark current noise as well...those faint outer regions are very noisy.) To fully get those faint details above the noise floor, I settled on 8 minute exposures.


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## Roger N Clark (Dec 5, 2014)

jrista said:


> I disagree with this, just based on my practical experience with both the 7D and 5D III. ...
> 
> There are still issues with dark current. Hot pixels still exist in modern cameras. I cannot speak for the 7D II,



Jon,
First, this is supposed to be a thread about the 7D Mark II and what a game changer it is. You are talking about problems with older cameras. On page 7 you posted an image of the Orion nebula made with a 5DIII, 600 f/4, an hour of exposure, and many flats, darks, bias. You got a little of the faint nebula dust around M42. Nice image. BUT..

I am attaching an image made with the 7D2, 300 f/2.8, no flats, no darks, no bias, and only 27.5 minutes of exposure (plus a few short exposures down to 2seconds for the core of M42). That is 27 61 second exposures at ISO 1600. Simple tracking with an Astrotrac, and no guiding. Simple processing: raw conversion in photoshop with lens profile, and photoshop reads the hot/dead/stuck pixel list and does not include them in the raw conversion. Then simple align the images, and sigma clip average. Then stretch with curves in photoshop. There are NO issues with hot/stuck/dead pixels in the final image. There is no problem with amp glow or non uniformity of the background. The pink glow in the lower left is the emission from IC 342 where the Horsehead nebula is.

Your aperture is 150mm diameter/ mine at 107 mm diameter, square the ratio, so you collected twice the light per second from the subject and more than twice the exposure time, so 4 times the light. Yet I show much fainter nebulae using much simpler methods. THAT is why the 7D2 is a game changer. 

Again, please see my description of simplified methods for night photography here:
http://www.clarkvision.com/articles/night.photography.image.processing/
Flats, darks, and bias frames are no longer needed.

Roger


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## Don Haines (Dec 5, 2014)

Roger N Clark said:


> jrista said:
> 
> 
> > I disagree with this, just based on my practical experience with both the 7D and 5D III. ...
> ...


I find both of your pictures inspiring... but I must say that I am very impressed with the results Roger gets from a far simpler method... If I ever get a clear night here I have to go try this out!


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## DominoDude (Dec 5, 2014)

Roger N Clark said:


> jrista said:
> 
> 
> > I disagree with this, just based on my practical experience with both the 7D and 5D III. ...
> ...



Marvellous shot, Roger!
Good to see that good knowledge and proper usage makes this body, and its sensor, shine at least as bright as the nebulæ the two of you have shown us here.
To be honest, I think that this last piece of evidence is the best sign that 7D Mark II can deliver excellent images.


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## East Wind Photography (Dec 5, 2014)

DominoDude said:


> Roger N Clark said:
> 
> 
> > jrista said:
> ...



Now if we can get an equally impressive improvement in cloud filter technology we would not be here discussing all of this. 

Great shot Roger and nice article. Gives some of us some hope.


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## jrista (Dec 5, 2014)

Roger N Clark said:


> jrista said:
> 
> 
> > I disagree with this, just based on my practical experience with both the 7D and 5D III. ...
> ...




Very nice image! I like this one MUCH better than the horse head one!  You should have lead with this. 

Now, I need to correct a couple of things. First, I image from a pretty heavily light polluted red zone on the bortle scale. I was not imaging bare lens. I had an Astronomik CLS-XL filter inserted into my 5D III, which reduces the light by about one and a third stops or so (I did mention this before, but only briefly). I was not working with four times as much light. I wasn't even working with twice as much light. I'm currently working on replacing the Astronomik CLS-XL filter with an IDAS LPS-D1 or -P2, which has more passbands and fewer/smaller filtered bands. It should increase the amount of light I get in a given exposure.

Second, I did not use darks. I dither, but I did not use darks. The 200-frame master bias is months old, I generated it once back around July, and have been using it ever since. The flats I use because I do have dust motes. If your really clean and don't live in an arid place like Colorado, maybe you can get away with not having to deal with flats. Sure, it's possible to skip the calibration frames entirely...but I feel I need the flats at the very least, and when integrating with DSS, it wants a bias to calibrate both the flats and lights. You do what you gotta do.  However, I did NOT use darks...just to be clear on that.

Another thing to point out, you have a larger field of view and a stop faster aperture, which means more light concentrated onto each pixel. On top of that, the pixels are smaller with a lower FWC, so they saturate faster. Doesn't that ultimately mean you achieve a brighter exposure for a given unit time (regardless of what the ISO is, since that just affects the gain used)? 

I mean, if I increased my field of view by...what, ~25% (FoV * (600/480)...? Or would it be FoV * SQR(600/480)?), removed the CLS filter, increased the aperture by a stop, and was shooting under darker skies without as much light pollution, sure, I'd have been able to get more exposure in less time as well. Because of my skyfog levels, I'm either relegated to using shorter exposures and getting a lesser signal (I'm limited to about 180 seconds tops unfiltered), or forced to use some kind of filtration to block out the light pollution while passing useful nebula bands. I chose the latter...my prior posts should explain why.

I do not have a 400mm lens that I could use to normalize the field of view, but I can give short unfiltered subs a try, and simply stack many more of them. I can give a higher ISO a try as well. Just to see how things pan out in the end. LP is my limiting factor, and I don't think that I can pull out that much outer nebulosity in 30 minutes...but I'm curious enough to try now. I might need around 25% more time to offset the field of view difference, and on top of that there is the relative aperture difference. (Correct me if I am wrong, but the size of the physical aperture affects resolving power...more light per unit point of sky is gathered with a larger aperture (so you can resolve smaller stars), however overall light gathering capacity is still related to the relative aperture, since light is still falling off over the distance of the focal length...thus, a 300mm f/2.8 lens is still gathering more light per unit time per pixel than a 600mm f/4 lens, no?)

I don't know the specifics, and the 7D II may certainly be improved by having less hot pixels. I am not sure if that is necessarily a "game changer", although it certainly is an improvement. I would really like to know what your sky brightness levels are...as I think that plays a huge role in how much faint detail you can pull out in an image of a given total integration time. It sounds like you shot unfiltered with a faster lens as well, which to me makes it sound like you were sucking down a lot of light.

Sorry for being so contrary...but, once you factor in the circumstances of my imaging, I have to point out that I was NOT gathering four times as much light, not even a stop more light. Due to the wider FoV and faster relative aperture, I do believe you were getting more light _per pixel_, which has a significant impact on overall exposure. I am still skeptical that the 7D II is so much of a game changer as it's being made out to be. I don't just say that based on the discussion here. I have some 7D II data I'm working with...I may just post a screenshot, although I'm not sure I can share the RAW until I ask the owner. It honestly doesn't look that much better to me than most other Canon RAW data. It still has plenty of horizontal banding (although it's fat bands, not per-row banding), and plenty of color blotchiness and still has that very strong red cast. I see a very marginal improvement, not something game changing. I am always happy to admit when I am wrong...but, so far, I don't think that anything I've seen about the 7D II so far demonstrates that I am (at least regarding sensor performance...overall, I think the camera as a whole is a great performer, and once again fills the unique spot that the original 7D did.)


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## jrista (Dec 5, 2014)

For anyone who is interested, this is a useful way of measuring your skyfog brightness:


http://www.pbase.com/samirkharusi/image/37608572


It's simple and effective, and produces a comparable number. Last time I measured, I was getting around 18.66 Mag/sq arc-sec, which is ok, but far from dark sky quality. My exposure time to mid frame is around 75-78 seconds or so.





For those who are interested, some example exposures from a 5D III and 7D II:


5D III







7D II






Here's my personal opinion, based on what I observe. I see an improvement....but, it also seems like horizontal banding increased while vertical banding was eliminated. Still has the same general characteristic to color noise and red tint. Overall background noise levels do not seem to have dropped considerably, although the removal of vertical banding, and the thicker, softer nature of the horizontal banding certainly helps with the standard deviation. 


I do not necessarily see a huge improvement in how much I could lift the shadows...with debanding on both images, the ability to differentiate steps in the wedge from each other simply stops at around swatch 34 in both images.


Just for contrast, the NX1:








The ability to discern steps stops at swatch 38? That's about a stop, stop and a third more DR than the 7D II. Personally, and I mean just speaking for myself...not trying to tell everyone else what is or isn't for them, I could do far more with the data from the NX1 than I could with the data from the 7D II. No banding really to speak of. Clean, random noise without any visible color cast. Very low noise. I get more SNR right out the gate in each and every sub.





One final thing for Roger. I'm a Canon fan. All my equipment is Canon so far. I REALLY want Canon to take that quantum leap into the modern age with a sensor that competes with the likes of the one in the NX1, or Sony's Exmor. I really do. I especially do from an astrophotography standpoint. I could use a Samsung NX1 for astro, but I wouldn't have the ability to use all the amazing software tools, like BackyardEOS, with it. I would LOVE to have the NX1 level IQ in the 7D II. If it did, I'd have been first in line to preorder! 


I see extremely marginal improvements in Canon's sensor technology generation after generation. It does get better, but I guess I really want Canon to not just take these little micro steps, with a .1 stop improvement in DR here, or a .2 stop improvement there. The NX1 has at least a full stop improvement in DR. The Exmor has a full two stop improvement. (Personally, I don't like DXO's Print DR numbers, so I don't use them.) 


I don't see anything like that in the 7D II. Relative to the 7D, or the 60D, or the 5D III or even 1D X, I'm sure it's a nice improvement. However, when I look at images, when I stretch the raws, I don't see anything that I could, personally, honestly call a "game changer". I really, REALLY wish it was. But I don't see it.


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## Roger N Clark (Dec 5, 2014)

jrista said:


> Very nice image! I like this one MUCH better than the horse head one!  You should have lead with this.
> 
> Now, I need to correct a couple of things. First, I image from a pretty heavily light polluted red zone on the bortle scale. I was not imaging bare lens. I had an Astronomik CLS-XL filter inserted into my 5D III, which reduces the light by about one and a third stops or so (I did mention this before, but only briefly). I was not working with four times as much light. I wasn't even working with twice as much light. I'm currently working on replacing the Astronomik CLS-XL filter with an IDAS LPS-D1 or -P2, which has more passbands and fewer/smaller filtered bands. It should increase the amount of light I get in a given exposure.
> 
> Second, I did not use darks. I dither, but I did not use darks. The 200-frame master bias is months old, I generated it once back around July, and have been using it ever since. The flats I use because I do have dust motes. If your really clean and don't live in an arid place like Colorado, maybe you can get away with not having to deal with flats. Sure, it's possible to skip the calibration frames entirely...but I feel I need the flats at the very least, and when integrating with DSS, it wants a bias to calibrate both the flats and lights. You do what you gotta do.  However, I did NOT use darks...just to be clear on that.



Him Jon,
That's funny as I live in Colorado too, and made the Horsehead and M42 images from the Denver Astronomical Society site near Byers. The skies there are OK, but not super, and it was a night of bright airglow and high cirrus, so not great conditions. I often work in dusty environments too, and far dustier than Colorado (e.g. the dusty Serengeti). 





jrista said:


> Another thing to point out, you have a larger field of view and a stop faster aperture, which means more light concentrated onto each pixel. On top of that, the pixels are smaller with a lower FWC, so they saturate faster. Doesn't that ultimately mean you achieve a brighter exposure for a given unit time (regardless of what the ISO is, since that just affects the gain used)?
> 
> I mean, if I increased my field of view by...what, ~25% (FoV * (600/480)...? Or would it be FoV * SQR(600/480)?), removed the CLS filter, increased the aperture by a stop, and was shooting under darker skies without as much light pollution, sure, I'd have been able to get more exposure in less time as well. Because of my skyfog levels, I'm either relegated to using shorter exposures and getting a lesser signal (I'm limited to about 180 seconds tops unfiltered), or forced to use some kind of filtration to block out the light pollution while passing useful nebula bands. I chose the latter...my prior posts should explain why.



Lets try this example. It is raining uniformly over your back yard (if you don't have one, pretend you do). You cover the back yard in pans to collect water. Does it matter how big the pans are assuming none overflow? No it doesn't. The amount of water collected depends on the rate of rainfall and the time you leave the pans out.

One of the most confusing subjects among digital photographers these days seems to be understanding exposure. There is light density in the focal plane, and light from the subject. They are different. Let's do a simple example. 

Say a 100 mm focal length f/4 lens images a square object that results in 10 x 10 pixels in the camera with 5 micron pixels. Let's say the light in the scene results in a photon rate of 1 photon per second. The subject on the sensor is:
(10 pixels * 5 microns /pixel) squared = 50*50 = 2500 square microns, so we get 2500 photons per second.

Now let's move to a 200 mm f/4 lens. We still get 1 photon per square micron per second delivered to the sensor. But the subject is now 20 x 20 pixels due to the longer focal length.
Now the subject is (20 pixels * 5 microns /pixel) squared = 100*100 = 10,000 square microns. We then receive 10,000 photons per second
from the subject.

It is the increased amount of light given by the larger lens that gives the image quality with the longer focal length. We got 4 times the light. The 200 f/4 lens has double the diameter of the 100 f/4 lens, so 4 times the collecting area.

Read more about this in my 4-part series on exposure: http://www.clarkvision.com/articles/iso/
The key factor is called Etendue.

Field of view is irrelevant. What matters, especially in astrophotography and other low light photography where every photon counts to make a good image, is aperture to collect the light, and exposure time to collect light long enough.

So in your case, the 600 f/4 lens and 5DIII camera with 6.25 micron pixels, giving Etendue per pixel (area of the lens times solid angle of the pixel, called the A Omega product:
Lens area, A = 150 mm * 150mm * pi /4 = 17671 sq mm
Pixel solid angle = Omega = (206265 * 0.00625 micron pixels / 600 mm focal length) squared = 2.148 arc-seconds^2 = 4.6 square arc seconds
Etendue = A*Omega = 17671 *4.6 ~ 81300 sq mm sq arc-sec

My 300 on the 7DII with 4.09 micron pixels:
A = 107*107*pi/4 = 8992 sq mm, Omega = (206265 * .00409/300)^2 = 2.81*2.81 = 7.9 sq arc-sec
Etendue = A*Omega = 8992 * 7.9 ~ 71000

So your system was receiving 81300 / 71000 = 1.14 times more light per pixel per second. But your image size is larger so an object in your image covers more pixels and more pixel equal more light FROM the SUBJECT. You have more pixels by the factor 2.81/2.148, or 1.3 times in each dimension, so 1.3^2 = 1.7 times more pixel on the subject. That combined with the 1.14 gives 1.94x. So your system delivered 1.94 times the light per second as my system. You exposed for 60 minues to my 27.5, so another 60/27.5 = 2.18 times more light.


Total light collected for your image from the subject = 1.94*2.18 = 4.2 times more light than for my image. That means 4.2 times more light from the Trapezium, 4.2 times more light from a small nebula, etc.




jrista said:


> I don't know the specifics, and the 7D II may certainly be improved by having less hot pixels. I am not sure if that is necessarily a "game changer", although it certainly is an improvement. I would really like to know what your sky brightness levels are...as I think that plays a huge role in how much faint detail you can pull out in an image of a given total integration time. It sounds like you shot unfiltered with a faster lens as well, which to me makes it sound like you were sucking down a lot of light.



See above; you got more light. If you had a brighter sky, that would limit how faint you could get. But see my review on the 5DIII. it still suffers from banding. I also have dark frames and I agree that it has amp glow, so not the best implementation of on sensor dark current suppression, especially considering when it was introduced. The 7D2 is much better.

My sky was magnitude 21.1 per square arc-second. Contact me off list. The next new Moon, maybe we could go to the same location. New Moon will be the weekend of Dec 20. I would like to get out to a dark site. Not sure where you live in Colorado.




jrista said:


> Sorry for being so contrary...but, once you factor in the circumstances of my imaging, I have to point out that I was NOT gathering four times as much light, not even a stop more light. Due to the wider FoV and faster relative aperture, I do believe you were getting more light _per pixel_, which has a significant impact on overall exposure. I am still skeptical that the 7D II is so much of a game changer as it's being made out to be. I don't just say that based on the discussion here. I have some 7D II data I'm working with...I may just post a screenshot, although I'm not sure I can share the RAW until I ask the owner. It honestly doesn't look that much better to me than most other Canon RAW data. It still has plenty of horizontal banding (although it's fat bands, not per-row banding), and plenty of color blotchiness and still has that very strong red cast. I see a very marginal improvement, not something game changing. I am always happy to admit when I am wrong...but, so far, I don't think that anything I've seen about the 7D II so far demonstrates that I am (at least regarding sensor performance...overall, I think the camera as a whole is a great performer, and once again fills the unique spot that the original 7D did.)



See above on the amount of light. 4.2x. Color blotchiness is a function of the raw converter, not the sensor. There is negligible banding at ISO 1600 in the 7d2.

The sensor data in my reviews is independent of any lens or raw converter. Many things one sees online are also a function of the lens and raw converter used.

Compare my 5DIII data: http://www.clarkvision.com/reviews/evaluation-canon-5diii/
to the 7D2 data: http://www.clarkvision.com/reviews/evaluation-canon-7dii/

Look at the pattern noise in tables 2a and 2b. The 5DIII shows significant banding even at ISO 1600. Not so with the 7D2. That makes a major difference in pulling out faint detail. The 5DIII also has higher dark current, and that too limits your ability to get faint.

Roger


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## Roger N Clark (Dec 5, 2014)

Jon,
Your bar tests are not equal. The NX1 chart is severely overexposed on the bright end so no wonder it shows better on the low end.

Roger


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## jrista (Dec 5, 2014)

Roger N Clark said:


> Jon,
> Your bar tests are not equal. The NX1 chart is severely overexposed on the bright end so no wonder it shows better on the low end.
> 
> Roger




None of the images are over-exposed. It's just a screen stretch in PixInsight, which tends to radically push up the highlights. All of the images exposed step 1 to roughly the same brightness levels. A screen stretch in PI tends to pull up the deepest tones to a common level...since there were deeper tones in the NX1 image than in the Canon images, that pushed the highlights up even more. Note, though, that this is just a "screen" stretch. When I measure areas of the image using the statistics tool, that's all done in linear space. The data is debayered, but beyond that, it's otherwise untouched, so the statistics are as good as I can get myself. (I may be able to load the images into PixInsight without debayering.) 


I am trying to get new step wedge images created. I don't have the cameras, someone else has them. I'm trying to get images from each camera that just barely clip step 1 in the wedge, which would baseline all the cameras exactly, allowing me to get more accurate information. There is some slight variation in the images I shared, but it isn't as significant as the screen stretch would imply.


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## Mt Spokane Photography (Dec 5, 2014)

Roger N Clark said:


> Jon,
> Your bar tests are not equal. The NX1 chart is severely overexposed on the bright end so no wonder it shows better on the low end.
> 
> Roger


 
Its difficult to do a test right, which is why there are so few online testers that are highly respected. Even so, I try to read as many as possible, since they sometimes come at things from a different angle. I've seen so many conflicting reviews and poorly done ones online that it gets frustrating. (Clarkvision is one of the good ones).

One thing that I think I have seen is many posts of beautiful bird photos, but the feather detail is smeared. I haven't yet formed a opinion because its a very difficult subject to photograph, and I have only seen FF or 1.3 crop images that are better. Lens settings, shutter speed, vibration, air temperatures, distance to subject, etc all play a part, so real world images often merely reflect the photographers capabilities to deal with all those things.


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## jrista (Dec 5, 2014)

Roger N Clark said:


> Him Jon,
> That's funny as I live in Colorado too, and made the Horsehead and M42 images from the Denver Astronomical Society site near Byers. The skies there are OK, but not super, and it was a night of bright airglow and high cirrus, so not great conditions. I often work in dusty environments too, and far dustier than Colorado (e.g. the dusty Serengeti).




Ah! Well, cool! I had no idea. Colorado seems to be a hotspot for astrophotographers...I've met at least half a dozen on CloudyNights...and more seem to show up all the time. We should have a star party.  





Roger N Clark said:


> My sky was magnitude 21.1 per square arc-second. Contact me off list. The next new Moon, maybe we could go to the same location. New Moon will be the weekend of Dec 20. I would like to get out to a dark site. Not sure where you live in Colorado.




I'll PM you. 


Trying to keep the rest of this as compact as possible, so I'm going to snip some stuff out.



Roger N Clark said:


> Lets try this example. It is raining uniformly over your back yard (if you don't have one, pretend you do). You cover the back yard in pans to collect water. Does it matter how big the pans are assuming none overflow? No it doesn't. The amount of water collected depends on the rate of rainfall and the time you leave the pans out.
> 
> .../snip/...
> 
> ...





Roger N Clark said:


> *See above; you got more light. *




A couple of things. I still think things between the two cameras normalize out a bit once the factors below are considered, hence the reason I'm still skeptical that the 7D II is a huge improvement over prior Canon cameras, however I may be swayed here...so bear with me.

1. _I was using the Astronomik CLS filter._ Without the filter, sure, I'd have gathered more total light. The filter blocks about 1 1/3rd stops of light, so, at the very least, instead of a 4.2x increase in *total* light gathered, it's 4.2/2.66, or around 1.57x more *total* light. I agree, there is a difference in TOTAL light gathered. 

In the case of regular old terrestrial photography, this factor of total light gathered is very significant, as it can mean less noise. Thing is, it can mean less noise because you can frame the subject the same in both FF and APS-C cameras. In doing that, you gather more light in total for the same subject...more pixels on subject...more detail, less noise. I fully agree with that point.

However...

2. Is pixel size really _meaningless_ when it comes to astrophotography? Yes, I gathered more light* in total *with the larger frame, however as far as signal to read noise ratio, that is a per pixel thing. I have more sensor area spread out over more pixels, and I put more light onto _more pixels in total_, but the _amount of light *per pixel* was lower _(again, don't forget that I had a filter in place that was blocking 1 1/3rd stops of light). 

Going off of a 1.14x difference in light gathered without the filter, 1.14/1.56 = 0.73x. Assuming this is right, the signal of each pixel was thus closer to the noise floor than with your 7D II image...and the SNR of each pixel was lower. Consequence of me using a filter.

Using the data from your reviews, read noise of the 5D III at ISO 400 is 9.8e- (surprising...I was going off of sensorgen data, which put it around 5.something electrons...which is barely more than half what your tests indicate...I think your test is more accurate, given my experience with noise at ISO 400), while read noise from the 7D II at ISO 1600 is 2.4e-. I would (while using the filter) need to collect four times more subs to reduce noise to a similar level of one single 7D II frame, and even more than that to reduce noise to the level of your integration. I think the integration I shared before was 12x300s subs, so RN would have been averaged down to about 2.82e-. Assuming 27 subs with the 7D II, your integrations noise floor would have been 0.46e-. 

Yes, I gathered more light in total *per sensor*. I gathered less light _per pixel_, and had to deal with more read noise. The SNR in my subs was lower, signal was lower, noise floor was higher (ok, I conceed, higher ISO would probably have been better!)

I also had more skyfog (which, BTW, was extracted with PixInsights DynamicBackgroundExtraction...when skyfog is removed, the object signal is left behind, and since that signal is weaker, often significantly weaker, than the skyfog+object signal, it's even noisier). I don't know what the skyfog was that night, so I couldn't tell you what e-/min skyfog there was vs. e-/min object signal. Regardless, between the filter and the skyfog, I do not believe my OBJECT signal strength (which is largely what I was left with after DBE in PixInsight) was nearly as high as yours. If I had imaged under 21.1mg/sq" skies _without a filter_, I have no doubt my results would have been significantly better, probably more similar to yours (with the added negative of the 5D III banding...really hate that junk!  ) 

Anyway. My point is... I was imaging with a filter, under ~18mg/sq" skies tops, so it is not surprising that the 7D II image is cleaner...but were basically comparing apples and oranges at the moment, so I don't think the differences between my image and yours are proof that the 7D II is a "game changer." I do, however, now believe the 7D II is a solid improvement for astrophotography over prior Canon cameras, with maybe the exception of the 6D (it produces some pretty good data as well.)



I could be off base here...been at this too long now today. 



I really would like to hit a dark site with you, get some better data, and do a better and more "apples to apples" comparison. The 7D II may really be a huge improvement. It would be interesting to test a couple other cameras as well, one with an Exmor, and if possible, the Samsung NX1. (I would really love to see you test a couple of those cameras using your method...the only broad source of low-level test data like that that we have is DXO, and so much of what DXO does is buried within a black box...I have a hard time trusting their data. Your reviews are open and detailed...would be awesome to see the D810, A7s, and NX1 tested by you.) I would be willing to bet the NX1 and A7s both trounce any Canon camera out there as far as astrophotography goes...but, that's mostly based off of my own testing. I don't have the quality of data you do when I examin raw data. 

Anyway, I am happy to admit that used under the right conditions, say 21.1mg/sq" skies and no filter, it may perform significantly better than I give it credit for...dark noise/hot pixels may not be as much of an issue if I could expose shorter. I may be blaming the 5D III for noise levels that are actually imposed on me by light pollution...

...and that leads me to this thought. I am interested in the ISO settings you've used. You certainly had much lower read noise. Maybe it's just a matter of my skyfog levels, as after I extract them with DBE, the remaining object signal is usually quite a bit noisier. I may simply be exposing longer to combat that issue, and thinking about it, the light added to the stars by light pollution does not get extracted, which may actually be the real cause of my star clipping issue. I've been exposing longer at lower ISO to get more dynamic range to avoid clipping my stars (which does seem to help), at the cost of faint detail SNR.




Roger N Clark said:


> If you had a brighter sky, that would limit how faint you could get. But see my review on the 5DIII. it still suffers from banding. I also have dark frames and I agree that it has amp glow, so not the best implementation of on sensor dark current suppression, especially considering when it was introduced. The 7D2 is much better.



Aye, I have very bright skies a lot of the time (and sometimes, they get very dark...orange zone if not darker). The 300 second subs I gathered were actually made on a night with poor visibility and high scattered light as well. I don't know if you remember, but back when we had that deep cold front moving through Colorado just a couple weeks ago, there were some clear nights, but the sky was REALLY milky and bright...transparency was terrible. That was the first time I imaged Orion...and it was probably a really bad idea to use data from those days. I forgot about that earlier today, but I may simply discard that whole entire set of data, and start fresh on a clearer night... That may have significantly limited my ability to expose good signal strength on those faint outer details... :-\ 




Roger N Clark said:


> See above on the amount of light. 4.2x. Color blotchiness is a function of the raw converter, not the sensor. There is negligible banding at ISO 1600 in the 7d2.
> 
> The sensor data in my reviews is independent of any lens or raw converter. Many things one sees online are also a function of the lens and raw converter used.
> 
> ...




Ok, fair enough. I have noticed that CaptureOne doesn't seem to have as much problem with the blotchy color as Lightroom. I still use Lightroom, as CaptureOne has far less support for various RAW file types, and my 60-day trial is going to run out any day now. But, it did seem to produce cleaner noise. I am not sure what PixInsight does, I think it's configurable, so I can go poke around. I may also be able to load the image without debayering.


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## Sabaki (Dec 5, 2014)

Roger N Clark, you've just taken me to school!!!

You've just become my reference point for sensor discussions.


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## Roger N Clark (Dec 5, 2014)

Jon,
One point abut your long response. You seem focused on read noise. A larger factor is noise from dark current. For example if dark current is 0.1 electron/seconds, and you do a one hour exposure, dark current will be 360 seconds * 0.1 e/sec = 360 electrons. While the dark current level is suppressed by on sensor electronics, the noise is not. So noise is is square root 360 = 19 electrons. You may have averaged the read noise, but one does not average the dark current noise--it just keeps accumulating. The fact that the 7D2 dark current is so much lower means that its noise contribution is that much lower.

Roger


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## jrista (Dec 5, 2014)

Roger N Clark said:


> Jon,
> One point abut your long response. You seem focused on read noise. A larger factor is noise from dark current. For example if dark current is 0.1 electron/seconds, and you do a one hour exposure, dark current will be 360 seconds * 0.1 e/sec = 360 electrons. While the dark current level is suppressed by on sensor electronics, the noise is not. So noise is is square root 360 = 19 electrons. You may have averaged the read noise, but one does not average the dark current noise--it just keeps accumulating. The fact that the 7D2 dark current is so much lower means that its noise contribution is that much lower.
> 
> Roger




Sure, I understand dark current is a factor. I also understand that it can be a significant factor with uncooled DSLRs. I don't think it is a key factor in my Orion images, or at least not the dominant noise factor. 


I do consider read noise more of a problem, however I guess that is probably because I am shopping CCD cameras, and I have recently been discussing this topic with other astrophotographers. With FLI and QSI CCD cameras, cooling deltaT below ambient is between -45C to -55C, with dark current noise levels around 0.02e-/s/px @-15C for KAF type sensors, and 0.003e-/s/px @-10C for Sony ICX type sensors. Most of the discussions I've had over the last couple of weeks have made the assumption that the sensor was being cooled, significantly, and that dark current noise was a trivial component of noise overall...which left read noise as the primary limiting noise factor. 


During the summer, I don't doubt I had some wicked high dark current noise (I actually know for a fact that I had really high dark current noise on a few nights that topped 80F, which lead to sensor temps that were pushing 40C, and a couple subs that actually had sensor temos over 40C...the dark current noise was insane. I actually have those subs somewhere...I should share, just for kicks if nothing else.  I kind of freaked when I thought my sensor was going to fry itself, pulled the camera off the lens, stuck it in the freezer for a while, and that seemed to fix the temperature spiking problem.) 


However, I forgot that my 300s series of subs were taken during that cold front. The 480s, 90s, 30s and 15s exposures were all taken later, after the deep freeze left Colorado, with sensor temps around 12C or so, maybe some around 8C. The 300s subs were 3c, a little above freezing. They have terrible skyfog, but dark current noise was barely visible (one or two hot pixels a frame, and the background sky noise levels were extremely low.)


At 300s exposures, assuming 0.1e-/s/px dark current would be 30e-, subtracted out by CDS, leaving behind 5.4e- DCN. That is still less than the 9.8e- RN. I guess it is additive, which puts the read noise floor at ~15.2e-...so yeah, not great. I was working off the assumption that read noise on the 5D III at ISO 400 was lower. Given that its almost 10e-, I am thinking I'll move to ISO 800, and see how that is. I still worry about clipping my stars with the lower saturation point, though...I like colorful stars.


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## Roger N Clark (Dec 5, 2014)

jrista said:


> I do consider read noise more of a problem, however I guess that is probably because I am shopping CCD cameras, and I have recently been discussing this topic with other astrophotographers. With FLI and QSI CCD cameras, cooling deltaT below ambient is between -45C to -55C, with dark current noise levels around 0.02e-/s/px @-15C for KAF type sensors, and 0.003e-/s/px @-10C for Sony ICX type sensors. Most of the discussions I've had over the last couple of weeks have made the assumption that the sensor was being cooled, significantly, and that dark current noise was a trivial component of noise overall...which left read noise as the primary limiting noise factor.



Hi Jon,
Look at the dark current, table 3 in my 7DII review. You are citing special cooling with 0.02 e/s at -15 C. The 7DII dark current is 0.02 at +15 C! Then you cite 0.003 e/s for a sony sensor at -10C. The 7DII is 0.003 e/s at -2 C.

Also, earlier I posted an image of M42. I actually posted the wrong image. That was not my final. Here is my final (also a little larger):
http://www.clarkvision.com/galleries/gallery.astrophoto-1/web/orion.nebula.m42_61,10,4,2sec_c11.21.2014.0J6A1631-1657-SigAv.h-b5x5s.html

Then I combined my Horsehead and M42 into a panorama. Note these images were independently stretched and one had over 2 times the exposure:
http://www.clarkvision.com/galleries/gallery.astrophoto-1/web/horsehead+m42_300mm_c11.21.2014.0J6A1631-1750-SigAv.h-pan1-b5x5s.html

Roger


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## jrista (Dec 5, 2014)

Hmm, I may be confused. Are those charts dark current, or dark current noise? I guess I thought those charts were dark current _noise_, rather than dark current. If they are actually dark current...how are you actually measuring that, if the dark current is subtracted on-sensor by the CDS units? The dark current itself wouldn't be in the RAW image data to be measured... If you were deriving it from dark current noise, how do you differentiate read noise from dark current noise in the RAW data?


If you are saying the 7D II has that low of *dark current*, not just very low dark current noise, then I misunderstood something about your review of the 7D II...


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## jrista (Dec 5, 2014)

Roger N Clark said:


> Then I combined my Horsehead and M42 into a panorama. Note these images were independently stretched and one had over 2 times the exposure:
> http://www.clarkvision.com/galleries/gallery.astrophoto-1/web/horsehead+m42_300mm_c11.21.2014.0J6A1631-1750-SigAv.h-pan1-b5x5s.html






Very nice!


I checked out the 7D 1 horse head. I actually like the processing on that one more...the flame nebula in the new one from the 7D II has some funky tonal transitions, flame has nice smooth transitions on the older image. That kind of stands out and draws the eye in the new image, but I'm sure it could be fixed. (At least, I hope it can...that isn't some artifact of the data, is it?)


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## LetTheRightLensIn (Dec 5, 2014)

Roger N Clark said:


> There seems to be a lot of emphasis on dynamic range and read noise.



Because that is what Canon has fallen way behind on.



> In long exposure photography with digital cameras (not cooled scientific cameras), there are generally 3 factors that impact detecting faint signals:
> 1) noise from dark current
> 2) adequately digitizing the low end
> 3) pattern noise
> ...



True, but the average person doesn't do long exposure astro photography and thus a lot more comments on the DR and read noise.





> So to detect faint signals and record the best detail in that faint signal, whether low light astro photo, or shadow detail in a very dark shadow, it is best to work at an iso that adequately digitizes that low end, and that is NOT at low iso, whether canon, nikon, sony, or whomever. It has nothing to do with read noise.



I didn't think quantization noise came up since they didn't produce enough real data to matter yet.



> Do the same thing with Canon data and, surprise, the dynamic range can be increased more than a stop. The Nikon methodology seems ugly to me from a science standpoint, but it produces amazing results in pleasing images and boosts dynamic range measurements that ignore that fact. Do the same thing with canon and see similar amazing results.



You don't see similar amazing results at all. The details are just not there even if the noise is 'less'.



> The internet is abuzz over dynamic range at low iso and canon's "poor" performance in that area. Yes, canon remains low in this regard, but higher dynamic range at the high end where dynamic range is shrinking and thus more important for high iso photographers.



Yes, but:

1. not everyone is a high iso photographer/astro photographer only
2. Canon is not behind up there much so of course that is not what people will complain about



> They key is one can make great photos with any system, and if one knows the weaknesses (and they ALL have weaknesses), then one can compensate for known weaknesses in real world imaging.



Of course, but the fact is that you can also get freedom to take a lot more types of shots and can be free to spend a heck of a lot less time slaving over post-processing for some types of shots with other systems.



> A final point. If the internet DR is everything poeple had a point about dynamic range being such a problem they (and DXO Mark) seem to think it is, there could never have been a decent image made with slide film and its 5 to 7 stops of DR. That is obviously not true. Modern DSLRs have impressive dynamic range and if one can't make a good image with 10 stops of DR, I'm sorry, but that is saying more about the photographer than the camera.



BS implication at the end there

And of course you can take a billion amazing shots with a Canon DSLR today and you could take a billion amazing shots with K64. But that doesn't mean that shooting with a D810 might not open you up to a ton of extra possibilities that might be tricky or impossible in some other cases. Maybe some people are interested in shooting that stuff too.

It says a lot about someone to call out those who care about that.



Roger Clark
http://www.clarkvision.com/
[/quote]


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## fragilesi (Dec 5, 2014)

LetTheRightLensIn said:


> BS implication at the end there
> 
> And of course you can take a billion amazing shots with a Canon DSLR today and you could take a billion amazing shots with K64. But that doesn't mean that shooting with a D810 might not open you up to a ton of extra possibilities that might be tricky or impossible in some other cases. Maybe some people are interested in shooting that stuff too.
> 
> It says a lot about someone to call out those who care about that.



So both the Canon and the Nikon are very good cameras. Both have relative strengths and weaknesses and both will get you pictures in certain scenarios that the other won't and both make certain things easier than the other. You pick the camera system that's best for you is the simplistic answer. Me, I'd pick the 7dII over the Nikon but that's because it suits me, others would choose differently.

What I won't do is head over to a forum dedicated to the other tech and say that its weaknesses mean it's a worse system just because it doesn't suit me personally. Which oddly is what a number of people do here.


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## scyrene (Dec 5, 2014)

jrista said:


> My current project, wide field Orion's Sword with the 5D III+EF 600/4 II+Astronomik CLS-XL, using 480s, 300s, 90s and 15s exposures at ISO 400 (dithered, calibrated with a 200-frame master bias and 30-frame master flat along with the cosmetic corrections for hot and cold pixels in DSS), has revealed a lot of the very faint outer dust regions. This image below is just 1 hours worth of 300s exposures (out of my minimum goal of 6 hours), with sensor temperatures around 12-16°C gathered during the dark late waning/new moon phases:
> 
> 
> 
> ...



That's a beautiful shot, in my opinion, but may I ask (and apologies if it should be obvious) why the colours are that way? In visible light, the Orion Nebula looks pink/green in my shots.


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## scyrene (Dec 5, 2014)

Don Haines said:


> As digital cameras mature, you will see less and less difference in IQ between revisions... everyone is approaching a wall.



I think this is an important point. People keep throwing around the term 'game changer'. Actually evolutionary improvements on good designs (and I still contend that the DSLR is a good design for many purposes) is surely better than revolutionary creations that don't stand the test of time. Not that I'm saying any given camera is that.


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## Roger N Clark (Dec 5, 2014)

jrista said:


> Hmm, I may be confused. Are those charts dark current, or dark current noise? I guess I thought those charts were dark current _noise_, rather than dark current. If they are actually dark current...how are you actually measuring that, if the dark current is subtracted on-sensor by the CDS units? The dark current itself wouldn't be in the RAW image data to be measured... If you were deriving it from dark current noise, how do you differentiate read noise from dark current noise in the RAW data?
> 
> 
> If you are saying the 7D II has that low of *dark current*, not just very low dark current noise, then I misunderstood something about your review of the 7D II...



Table 2 in my review http://www.clarkvision.com/reviews/evaluation-canon-7dii/
shows dark current in column 3.

Dark current is suppressed, but the noise is not. In a long exposure with no light, the noise is a combination of that from dark current plus apparent read noise. If the exposure is long enough, then thermal noise dominates over read noise. Read noise is subtracted (noise adds as the square root of the squares) leaving thermal noise. The log plot (Figure 3) shows an excellent linear trend. Sometimes the curves turn upward (Canon 6D, 1DX in the figure) indicating sensor heating limits the sensor from getting to a low temperature. The last 5 columns in Table 3 show the noise from dark current for different exposures so you can see where noise from dark current is greater than read noise. Noise from dark current is independent of ISO.

Roger


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## jrista (Dec 5, 2014)

scyrene said:


> That's a beautiful shot, in my opinion, but may I ask (and apologies if it should be obvious) why the colours are that way? In visible light, the Orion Nebula looks pink/green in my shots.




I chose to process such that the colors would come out that way.  It started as an accident, as I used SCNR to reduce green channel noise too early in the process, but I kind of liked it, as it made the image look more like some narrow band images I've seen, so I left it. 


Normal coloring is gray for the outer reflection dust on Orion Neb, pinkish for the inner Ha glow, and blueish for the reflection off Running Man.


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## AlanF (Dec 5, 2014)

Roger
It is great to have you join the forum.
Alan


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## scyrene (Dec 5, 2014)

Roger N Clark said:


> Flat fields are not needed if you are using profiled camera lenses. Certainly start with a clean sensor, but with the step above, you should have no dust spots and with fast lenses, dust spots don't really show. During raw conversion (e.g. photoshop ACR) simply select the lens profile and viola! the flat field is applied. Quick and simple. Again details in the above link.



May I ask, do lens profiles cover colour imbalances across the frame, or just vignetting/distorition? The biggest hurdle with using the 85mm f/1.2L II I found was a complex range of colours that was asymmetrical across the frame, especially apparent after heavy processing.


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## neuroanatomist (Dec 5, 2014)

fragilesi said:


> So both the Canon and the Nikon are very good cameras. Both have relative strengths and weaknesses and both will get you pictures in certain scenarios that the other won't and both make certain things easier than the other. You pick the camera system that's best for you is the simplistic answer. Me, I'd pick the 7dII over the Nikon but that's because it suits me, others would choose differently.
> 
> What I won't do is head over to a forum dedicated to the other tech and say that its weaknesses mean it's a worse system just because it doesn't suit me personally. Which oddly is what a number of people do here.



+1

I think you forgot about the part where those who choose to do the latter seem (falsely?) surprised at the reaction they (intentionally) provoke, then proceed to complain about the flak they receive.


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## scyrene (Dec 5, 2014)

Mt Spokane Photography said:


> Roger N Clark said:
> 
> 
> > Jon,
> ...



Feather detail is the holy grail for me - as in, the individual filaments. Of course, at web resolution, it's not always important. In my experience, it's mostly distance to the subject, though other factors are doubtless important


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## jrista (Dec 5, 2014)

Roger N Clark said:


> jrista said:
> 
> 
> > Hmm, I may be confused. Are those charts dark current, or dark current noise? I guess I thought those charts were dark current _noise_, rather than dark current. If they are actually dark current...how are you actually measuring that, if the dark current is subtracted on-sensor by the CDS units? The dark current itself wouldn't be in the RAW image data to be measured... If you were deriving it from dark current noise, how do you differentiate read noise from dark current noise in the RAW data?
> ...






Interesting. Any chance you have the margin of error as you get up into the higher ISO settings? I'm curious to try this method out on some of the cameras I am interested in buying. I've heard from other astrophotographers that dark current on Sony Exmor sensors is the lowest they have ever seen, and they no longer bother with dark frames as a result. Some don't even bother with dithering, as they haven't seen reason to.


For the most part, I've just relied on manufacturer spec sheets to get dark current values. I've seen some tests from the likes of Craig Stark and a few others that indicate at least for the Sony ICX sensors that dark current is around 0.003-0.002e-/s/px at -10C, which is low enough that you have to expose for 30 minutes before dark current levels even reach the RN level of those sensors. You have to expose for 2h 42m before dark current noise reaches the RN level of those sensors. Hence the reason it's usually considered a non-factor. 


Anyway, I'm curious what you use to process the data and get your results? I haven't had a chance to see if I can open the RAW images in PixInsight without debayering. I am pretty sure Iris software can do that, though, so at the very least, I could fall back on that. I'm curious now to see what the dark current of the 5D III is in practice...just for my own benefit, so I can determine how long I should be exposing to avoid excessive DCN levels.


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## Mt Spokane Photography (Dec 5, 2014)

AlanF said:


> Roger
> It is great to have you join the forum.
> Alan


 
+1

I'm unlikely to ever get into astronomical photography, but I like to know about it. I was reading Michael Reichmann's article on the Pentax 645Z.

Out of curiousity, how much difference is there?

http://www.luminous-landscape.com/techniques/astrophotography_next_steps.shtml


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## Chosenbydestiny (Dec 5, 2014)

TLN said:


> game changing, game changing, game changing, blah blah..
> 
> But show photos from 7d1 and 7d2 to people, and they' won't recognize what camera is where.
> 
> What is really game changing, sony A7 or a7s. Or new 5-axis sensor stabilization in A7 II. Btw it cost as much as 7d2.




Until you shoot indoor sports, or indoor anything for that matter. Some people couldn't tell my iphone photos from a Nikon D700 or 5D Mark II outdoors on a sunny day. Is that supposed to NOT be game changing? And then the rest of your post is Sony blah blah blah, which costs as much as everything else that people can freely choose to purchase for their needs.


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## raptor3x (Dec 5, 2014)

jrista said:


> Interesting. Any chance you have the margin of error as you get up into the higher ISO settings? I'm curious to try this method out on some of the cameras I am interested in buying. I've heard from other astrophotographers that dark current on Sony Exmor sensors is the lowest they have ever seen, and they no longer bother with dark frames as a result. Some don't even bother with dithering, as they haven't seen reason to.



How do they deal with the amp noise at the frame edges? The A7 and both A7Rs I've owned all had pretty severe purple glow when you start pushing up the ISO and it seems like this would be a major problem without dark frames.


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## jrista (Dec 5, 2014)

Chosenbydestiny said:


> TLN said:
> 
> 
> > game changing, game changing, game changing, blah blah..
> ...




I believe the game changer argument was in relation to astrophotography. If the dark current really is as low as Roger has determined, then the 7D II has some of the lowest DC in the industry. I'm curious to know how much the Exmor has, I think it is similarly low, but regardless...for Canon, that level of very low dark current is a solid improvement over prior sensors, which is a pretty big deal for astro imaging.


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## jrista (Dec 5, 2014)

raptor3x said:


> jrista said:
> 
> 
> > Interesting. Any chance you have the margin of error as you get up into the higher ISO settings? I'm curious to try this method out on some of the cameras I am interested in buying. I've heard from other astrophotographers that dark current on Sony Exmor sensors is the lowest they have ever seen, and they no longer bother with dark frames as a result. Some don't even bother with dithering, as they haven't seen reason to.
> ...




I've seen a faint amount of purplish _noise_ in A7r images...across the whole frame though, and only when you stretch really heavily. I haven't seen much in the way of what I would call amp glow, though. Nothing like the amp glow I get with the 5D III anyway. I am not sure about the A7, I've heard it's worse with that camera. If it is amp glow or some other thermal signal, then yes, you would need darks to handle it. In the case of the 5D III, if it presents badly, I just crop a little tighter and exclude the worst of it (because its primarily along the right edge o the frame)...without regulating sensor temp, creating and integrating with darks becomes a major pain.


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## NancyP (Dec 5, 2014)

Thanks for visiting, Roger. I need to read some of the general introductory material at your site, a lot of the details are above my head. 

The takeaway is that 7D2 is better than 6D for astrophotography? 

I am interested in the 7D2 mostly for its "intended" use, bird and wildlife photography, but dabble in UWA astro-landscape when I get the chance - relative dark is about 2 hours away, but not much can deal with the cloudiness  in my location (Midwest).

BTW, Sony fans, IBIS may be great for many commonly used focal length lenses, but it is severely challenged when using supertelephoto lenses.


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## LetTheRightLensIn (Dec 5, 2014)

fragilesi said:


> What I won't do is head over to a forum dedicated to the other tech and say that its weaknesses mean it's a worse system just because it doesn't suit me personally. Which oddly is what a number of people do here.



You are making a false assumption that most of those bringing up low ISO DR are Nikon/Sony/etc. users when most are actually long time Canon users. So there is no going over to the 'other' forum since they are posting in their own brand's forum to begin with.

And it's interesting that some improvements for astro photography are awesome (and they are) but then if say some landscape (not that only landscape shooters can benefit) shooter is looking for a 3 stops improvement, that's just minor nonsense and it's all on the photographer, people have made great pics forever so why should they even care, it just says something about the photographer doesn't it.

Well yeah how about we say the same and ask Roger to go back to shooting astro on D30 then? After all if he can't make due with shooting his pics on a D30 even though thousands of amazing pics have been taken with a D30 I guess that just says something about him and not the D30 right? Come on! Why doesn't he just use a pinhole camera for his work? People have made awesome pics with those right? If he can't then I guess that just really says a lot about him right?

Just sick of all the nonsense where people just put down anyone who dares want to push things forward regarding something that someone else doesn't need/do or regarding something their pet brand that they worship doesn't do the best.

Gotta love it, 14% better this and much better dark current that and it's a game changer (fine enough) but then if someone brings up 3 stops DR at low ISO it just says something bad about them, who could care about such nonsense as that. :


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## Marsu42 (Dec 5, 2014)

LetTheRightLensIn said:


> fragilesi said:
> 
> 
> > What I won't do is head over to a forum dedicated to the other tech and say that its weaknesses mean it's a worse system just because it doesn't suit me personally. Which oddly is what a number of people do here.
> ...



+1 - I'd speculate that most posters discussing possible future improvements (this is a rumors forum, after all) are long time Canon brand users and have an attachment to their brand or made major investments. Except from (few?) real trolls, people just wanting the optimal tool for low iso dr or high res simply dump Canon and switch to Nikon and accompanying forums.

Given how much time has passed since the release of the high-res d800 and Canon (afaik) not issuing any official statements how they're going to proceed, I find there's a surprisingly large number of people still left hoping for the best.

Imho Canon should give some indication what's it going to be - are they only planing to do a high-res €5000+ camera, or is the Canon system adapting higher res in all price regions? Everything's fine as people are free to buy what they want, and I personally don't need/want more mp - but it's unfortunate to be left in the dark about the future of this system.


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## jrista (Dec 5, 2014)

Chosenbydestiny said:


> TLN said:
> 
> 
> > game changing, game changing, game changing, blah blah..
> ...




While I think the 7D II is definitely better for indoor sports, I don't think it is necessarily game changing from the standpoint of frame rate or high ISO noise levels or anything like that. The 1D X has been used for indoor sports plenty, and it offers a better feature set than the 7D II in most cases. The 7D II is cheaper, which can be important for the amateur sports photographer, but I don't know that that is necessarily "game changing". The feature of the 7D II that is game changing for indoor sports is the light oscillation detection...now THAT is a pretty awesome feature, and from what I've seen, it works extremely well.


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## raptor3x (Dec 5, 2014)

jrista said:


> raptor3x said:
> 
> 
> > jrista said:
> ...



That's really interesting. All three A7/A7R bodies I've owned have had significantly worse amp glow (the purple glow near the borders) than my 5D3.


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## jrista (Dec 5, 2014)

Marsu42 said:


> LetTheRightLensIn said:
> 
> 
> > fragilesi said:
> ...




+10 


The lack of information coming from Canon about their future direction is certainly frustrating for those of us who want non-Canon level IQ (i.e. NX1/Exmor/Toshiba HEZ1) in a Canon body. There are so many benefits and zero drawbacks to having a sensor with better IQ, it would be really nice to have another couple of stops DR in Canon's future products. It would be even nicer to know that Canon is actually doing something about it, working on something for the next products, that will actually bring better IQ/lower DR to the table. 


Not knowing, and knowing only the past where Canon has trickled out minor improvements in overall sensor IQ (lower dark current is nice for AP, but it doesn't really mean anything for regular photography) for so many years now, and hoping that doesn't remain their policy, is very frustrating.


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## jrista (Dec 5, 2014)

raptor3x said:


> jrista said:
> 
> 
> > raptor3x said:
> ...




Is this an issue with regular short-exposure photos, or only with longer exposures? I never did longer exposures with the A7r, and I had to dig REALLY deep to start finding color noise in the images I did take. I did not do astrophotography with it (did not have the opportunity, I really wanted to.) If there is amp glow, then yes, you would need to use darks to combat that. That can be tough, getting temp-aligned darks with non-temp regulated cameras is very difficult. You also have to be careful with images from low-noise electronics, as calibrating with darks can actually INCREASE the amount of random noise, even while it removes hot pixels and amp glow and other thermal signals. Sony sensors do have extremely low noise, so if you DO want to calibrate with darks, you are probably going to need to get at least 50-80 dark frames to integrate into a master, so that the noise levels in the dark are low enough to avoid increasing noise in each calibrated light.


One way to manage DSLR sensor temps is with a cold box. These are peltier-cooled, insulated enclosures for cameras. I've built myself a cold box for my Canon DSLRs, but without direct contact on the camera body, it's been difficult to get the inside of the box cold enough (at least with a single peltier...I have a second one that I need to try adding, to double the cooling and effectiveness), or regulated well enough, to help me maintain an even temperature for both lights and darks...so I still don't bother with darks (and I just deal with the 5D III amp glow.) 


It should be noted, just for clarity sake, that amp glow is not dark current. Amplifier glow can be caused by heat conducted to the sensor or infrared radiation (~750-1100nm) from electronics or another source reaching the sensor, behaving like light, and releasing electrons in pixels. It's usually due to inadequate shielding or heat removal, although for IR to be a problem, the IR cut filter would have to be removed (i.e. as in a AP modded camera). That is a separate and additive thing that goes along with dark current. You can have both simultaneously. Dark current is a pretty constant thing (while amp glow can very frame to frame as the temp of off-die heat sources like ADC units or DSPs increase in temperature), leakage current flowing through the photodiode and pixel circuitry at a pretty constant rate. The release of electrons is related to temperature and the design of the pixel/photodiode, so the doubling temp is not the same across all sensors (dark current doubling temp can range from ~4.xe- to over 6e-). Higher temperatures can actually increase the sensitivity of the photodiodes to light as well...it doesn't just increase dark current, although the change in Q.E. tends to be non-linear...it increases much faster with temperature in the infrared spectrum than in the visible light spectrum. So, as temperatures in the electronics increase, both in the sensors and in off-die electronics, the chance that you will experience amplifier glow starts to increase exponentially (you get more heat/IR and increased sensitivity to it all). (When I image during the summer, long exposures, say five minutes and longer, usually result in a fairly strong amp glow to the right side of my sensor. Imaging during winter, I usually don't experience any amp glow at all.)


I'd love to find some official specs about the 7D II sensor, to see what the engineering spec on dark current is. I don't think Canon has ever released such information though. Sony releases spec sheets on their ICX CCD sensors, but I haven't seen many spec sheets for CMOS sensors. There is an article by Craig Stark where he tested an Atik 314+ CCD camera, which exhibited 0.0005e-/s/px dark current at I believe -10C...which is the best I've ever heard of.


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## fragilesi (Dec 5, 2014)

LetTheRightLensIn said:


> fragilesi said:
> 
> 
> > What I won't do is head over to a forum dedicated to the other tech and say that its weaknesses mean it's a worse system just because it doesn't suit me personally. Which oddly is what a number of people do here.
> ...




That's odd, how did you extrapolate "a number" to mean "most"? I don't think it's me making the biggest assumptions.

I think I've been perfectly clear in many posts. I *do* understand for example the points made by the likes of jrista about DR. He's presented his evidence, I've seen it, agreed with it and fully understand why it's important to him. I would also like my 70D to have Exmoor-like recovery capability. It would be nice and I'm sure on occasion I'd use it.

Unfortunately there isn't a camera system with the advantages I do have like the glass, the reliability, the AF, the toughness, the ergonomics and so on plus Exmoor at the price. So, unless you want to tell me otherwise I don't see good enough reasons for *me* to switch and learn a new system. Oddly, as you've said neither do most of the people who are writing about how unhappy they are because they are still using Canon. Ergo it cannot be THAT bad using Canon because the positives outweigh the negatives.

So,in summary. I am not claiming anything about 14% improvements. I am not putting you down. I do not worship any kind of camera system or indeed any other electrical gadget. I am not claiming that the things I need from my camera are the most important for all photography or more important than the ones that you want. 

In short I'm trying my best to take a balanced approach and appealing for others to do the same. What I won't do is sit here and agree with people who take one or two aspects of other camera system or raw specs and try to make out that it makes those systems better than the one I use and like.


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## dtaylor (Dec 5, 2014)

LetTheRightLensIn said:


> And it's interesting that some improvements for astro photography are awesome (and they are) but then if say some landscape (not that only landscape shooters can benefit) shooter is looking for a 3 stops improvement, that's just minor nonsense and it's all on the photographer, people have made great pics forever so why should they even care, it just says something about the photographer doesn't it.



If a competitor had a >20 stop sensor that eliminated GND filters and HDR, that would be a "game changer" and would warrant the endless discussion and hand wringing we see here.

As is there are a couple stops of difference, which can be useful at times, but which simply cannot replace the techniques landscape photographers have used for years and decades. jrista's own interior shot demo that was here a while back showed two things. One, the Sony had more shadow latitude and the shadows were of higher quality. Two, even the Sony could not be stretched to retain the highlights and at the same time yield shadow quality that would be acceptable for publication. With a paying client you would be bracketing on either camera.

If you're into sports, the 7D II's AF and buffer make a real difference. If you're into astro, it's sensor characteristics apparently make a notable difference. If you're into landscapes...well...for all the words spilled on the Internet over DR and DxO I'm not sure it has ever actually resulted in a print that's observably better then another print. It's hard to even make the tripod/hand held argument when you can easily hand hold 2-3 frame brackets with no IS, and 5-7 with the latest IS lenses.

As I've said before, Sony FF Exmor will sometimes save you time and effort. And that's nothing to sneeze at. I would fault no one for buying a D810 or A7 for the sole purpose of saving time and effort. But you're not going to miss the shot on Canon. Canon's lenses, AF, UI, build quality, etc, etc...for many people these are more important then a few extra minutes spent on a blend or adjusting a GND filter, especially since you often have to do the same with the competition.



> Just sick of all the nonsense where people just put down anyone who dares want to push things forward regarding something that someone else doesn't need/do or regarding something their pet brand that they worship doesn't do the best.



You are not pushing anything forward by posting here. A coordinated email campaign might get Canon's attention. A letter with a copy of your receipt for a D810 or A7R might get Canon's attention. Posts in these forums...or on any forums...are not going to get Canon's attention.

I am curious as to what Canon's management thinks of DxO and DR, if anything. And for the record I would love to see this improved. I just don't understand the obsession with it.

There's less difference today between the "weakest" sensor in an entry level, small format (m43, APS-C, FF) ILC and the best sensors in the most expensive small format ILCs then ever before. Yet some how we are spending more time talking about those differences, and people (not you specifically, nor jrista) on the Internet are becoming more arrogant about the performance of "their" sensor. It gets annoying, which is why you see the push back you are complaining about.


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## AvTvM (Dec 6, 2014)

I don't see any reason to be "balanced" if my current supplier delivers subpar product. As in every other business i give them clear warning and tell them what i want. I want the best value for every euro/dollar spent. 
14% improvements are ridiculous and utterly meaningless to me (u am not into astro photography). 
And What other customers want is totally irrelevant to me as well. 

If canon does not deliver FULLY COMPETITIVE products and will stop buying (measure is in effect).
And i will criticize them (measure is in effect).
And buy competitors product. Measure not yet in effect. But will be as soon as somebody meets my requirements. getting closer by the day. Maybe sony a9.


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## Lee Jay (Dec 6, 2014)

AvTvM said:


> I don't see any reason to be "balanced" if my current supplier delivers subpar product. As in every other business i give them clear warning and tell them what i want. I want the best value for every euro/dollar spent.
> 14% improvements are ridiculous and utterly meaningless to me (u am not into astro photography).
> And What other customers want is totally irrelevant to me as well.
> 
> ...



Good for you. Right now no one makes any system more well suited to my needs than Canon, and second place isn't even close. And Sony isn't in second _or_ third (and fourth is questionable)!


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## Monchoon (Dec 6, 2014)

AvTvM said:


> I don't see any reason to be "balanced" if my current supplier delivers subpar product. As in every other business i give them clear warning and tell them what i want. I want the best value for every euro/dollar spent.
> 14% improvements are ridiculous and utterly meaningless to me (u am not into astro photography).
> And What other customers want is totally irrelevant to me as well.
> 
> ...



I don't think anyone any day will meet your requirements, but please buy into another system then proceed to whine on their forums, I am sure that will be the only thing that will please you.


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## DominoDude (Dec 6, 2014)

AvTvM said:


> I don't see any reason to be "balanced" if my current supplier delivers subpar product. As in every other business i give them clear warning and tell them what i want. I want the best value for every euro/dollar spent.
> 14% improvements are ridiculous and utterly meaningless to me (u am not into astro photography).
> And What other customers want is totally irrelevant to me as well.
> 
> ...



No one's forcing you to buy anything you don't want. I'm guessing you are either a very good pro, or very bad photographer if Canons 7D Mark II doesn't suit you.
I will search through your posted photos to make up my mind on that.

Hmm, couldn't find any photos. But I did find this:



AvTvM said:


> To me this rumor is not credible at all.
> 
> Canon has every reason to follow up on the enormously successful 7D with another top-level APS-C camera.
> 
> ...



I can't say that I know how good or bad the Nikon D400 is (if it exists), but your statement above indicates that the 7D Mark II should be good enough for your standards. You even guessed correct on the price.


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## Roger N Clark (Dec 6, 2014)

jrista said:


> Interesting. Any chance you have the margin of error as you get up into the higher ISO settings? I'm curious to try this method out on some of the cameras I am interested in buying. I've heard from other astrophotographers that dark current on Sony Exmor sensors is the lowest they have ever seen, and they no longer bother with dark frames as a result. Some don't even bother with dithering, as they haven't seen reason to.
> 
> For the most part, I've just relied on manufacturer spec sheets to get dark current values. I've seen some tests from the likes of Craig Stark and a few others that indicate at least for the Sony ICX sensors that dark current is around 0.003-0.002e-/s/px at -10C, which is low enough that you have to expose for 30 minutes before dark current levels even reach the RN level of those sensors. You have to expose for 2h 42m before dark current noise reaches the RN level of those sensors. Hence the reason it's usually considered a non-factor.
> 
> Anyway, I'm curious what you use to process the data and get your results? I haven't had a chance to see if I can open the RAW images in PixInsight without debayering. I am pretty sure Iris software can do that, though, so at the very least, I could fall back on that. I'm curious now to see what the dark current of the 5D III is in practice...just for my own benefit, so I can determine how long I should be exposing to avoid excessive DCN levels.



Hi Jon,
I'm not sure what you mean by margin of error. You can see the scatter in my data in figure 3.

You cite the Sony ICX sensors in the 0.003 raneg at -10C,; the 7D2 reaches the 0.002 range at -2 C.

I use several programs for my analyses. DCRAW and RAWDIGGER for decoding the raw data without changing values. then my own custom code written mostly in Davinci from asu.edu (developed for spacecraft mission imaging data analysis).

Roger


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## Roger N Clark (Dec 6, 2014)

jrista said:


> It should be noted, just for clarity sake, that amp glow is not dark current. Amplifier glow is caused by infrared radiation (radiated heat) from electronics reaching the sensor, behaving like light, and releasing electrons in pixels. It's usually due to inadequate shielding.



Jon, that really isn't plausible. For Black Body (thermal) radiation at 30 C, the Black Body peak is around 10 microns, and the radiation where the silicon sensor is sensitive (less than 1.1 microns) the radiation is down by a factor of 10^13. There is also an IR blocking filter over the sensor, blocking another thousand or so. Thus there simply are not any photons from heat at a wavelength where the sensor is sensitive. At wavelengths longer than 1.1 microns, silicon becomes transparent and insensitive to light.

Amp glow is due to thermal heating of the sensor, by conduction of heat into the sensor.

Roger


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## neuroanatomist (Dec 6, 2014)

Roger, I'd like to add my thanks to those of others for your participation here!

—John


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## jrista (Dec 6, 2014)

Roger N Clark said:


> jrista said:
> 
> 
> > It should be noted, just for clarity sake, that amp glow is not dark current. Amplifier glow is caused by infrared radiation (radiated heat) from electronics reaching the sensor, behaving like light, and releasing electrons in pixels. It's usually due to inadequate shielding.
> ...




Well, yes, the IR filter would have to be removed, I agree. There was a fairly extensive thread on CN forums a while ago about a 6D self mod that experienced a new source of glow from an external source, but still inside the camera. The assumption was that it was an IR radiation source (as the issue increased with temp), and that the removal of LPF1 and LPF2 allowed radiation from this source to illuminate the sensor, as tests were performed in a pitch dark room, and the sensor was still getting glow from this one source. I actually do not know what wavelength the radiation was...there was no mention, and I guess there were no final concrete conclusions. Whatever it was, restoration of one of the low pass filters eliminated the problem...so perhaps not infrared heat...but infrared light of some wavelength.


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## Lee Jay (Dec 6, 2014)

With all the astro talk and the full moon, I thought I'd mention my favorite new astro accessory - the Canon 10x42L IS. Those things are way better than I ever expected them to be.


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## jrista (Dec 6, 2014)

Roger N Clark said:


> You cite the Sony ICX sensors in the 0.003 raneg at -10C,; the 7D2 reaches the 0.002 range at -2 C.




That is what the spec usually say on cooled CCD cameras from Atik, QSI, FLI. However, there is anarticle from Craig Stark where he tests an Atik 314L+, and experiences considerably lower dark current of 0.00076e-/s/px:


http://www.stark-labs.com/craig/articles/assets/CCD_SNR3.pdf


At this point, I haven't slept since Monday, so I am not making snense of what he said after that, or why he was measuring 0.0005e-/s/px. Regardles, these are the lowest dark current noise levels I've ever heard of. 


The 314L+ uses the Sony ICX285AL, and it has a limited maximum cooling of -27C below ambient. The standard cooling temp of Sony ICX CCDs is usually -10 however unless the ambient temperature was ~62F/17C, I on't even think the temperature of the snesor during his testing would have been that cold...at 65F ambient the sensor would reach it's minimum temperature of around -8C, and at 70 F ambient the sensor would reach a minimum temperature of -6C..

anyway...whatever I was sayind.....I don't know if the newer ICX674/694/834 sensors can reach that level of dark current...but regardless, when cooled to -10C, the dark current noise is a trivial factor for most common exposure time I think for an hour long exposure, which you shouldn;t need outside of narrow band oiii filter exposures on certain targets, dark current noise barely tops 3e- at a rate of 0.003e-/s/px. So none of the apers who use the Sony sensors ever bother with any dark frames...many don;t even bother to dither I don't think. 

KAF sensors (Now owned by ON semiconductor? Once Truesense, previously owned by Kodak) are definitely not as good. Its really old technology...fdamentaly I dont think it has changed in a very long time, a decade?...it's had minimal improvements, addition of microlenses, maybe a switch to AR glass and really small things like that...but it;s really old tech. So it is not surprising that it does nto have low dark current, and they don't have low read noise either (at best, around 7e- or so, most of the time it;s 10e- or higher) . The reason people still buy them is the sensors can be huge. The KAF-8300 is slightly smaller than APS-C. The KAF-11002 is FF size. The KAF-16803 is a monster 37x37mm square sensor. FLI just released a new camera with the KAF-50100, wich is a 49x37mm 50.1mp behemoth sensor. FLI and On Semiconductor apparently took the old 50100 sensor design, which used to have a mere 25% Q.E., added microlenses and apparently got the Q.E up to around 62%. That puppy is over $20k...so not exactly your hobby camera/  

Anyway...yeah, KAF sensors are very old...old tech, but they are monsters. You could fit 30 of the Atik 314L+ sensors into the area of a single KAF-50100.  So, maybe not as efficient andg enerally not as goo dfor narrow band imaging...but they make the most beautiful LRGB images tou will ever see. 

Ok, sorry...I think that was really sloppy writing, but I am too tired to go back and fix everything... :\



Roger N Clark said:


> I use several programs for my analyses. DCRAW and RAWDIGGER for decoding the raw data without changing values. then my own custom code written mostly in Davinci from asu.edu (developed for spacecraft mission imaging data analysis).



I know of RAWDIGGEr, anf I think IRIS uses DCRAW. I was figuring I'd use iris to examin the raw data anyway.


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## jrista (Dec 6, 2014)

Lee Jay said:


> With all the astro talk and the full moon, I thought I'd mention my favorite new astro accessory - the Canon 10x42L IS. Those things are way better than I ever expected them to be.




Binoculars? That reminds me...I ordered a pair of Oberwerk fully multicoated (even the prisms) 20x80's a while ago...I was hoping they would be here by now...I don't know where they are, or if they were ever shipped. I guess I chould check on that...


IS binoculars must be pretty nice, though.


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## jrista (Dec 6, 2014)

Sory guys. I'm being really sloppy tinight. Tonight. I have had very servere chronic insomnia for countless years...well over a decade. I go through periods where I just don't sleep for days, and I'm going through one now. After a while, you kind of feel like your drunk, even though your not... The nafter that, if you still haven't slept...yeahhh.......things get really really werid..............


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## AlanF (Dec 6, 2014)

jrista said:


> Sory guys. I'm being really sloppy tinight. Tonight. I have had very servere chronic insomnia for countless years...well over a decade. I go through periods where I just don't sleep for days, and I'm going through one now. After a while, you kind of feel like your drunk, even though your not... The nafter that, if you still haven't slept...yeahhh.......things get really really werid..............



So that's how you have time to do astrophotography?


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## jrista (Dec 6, 2014)

AlanF said:


> jrista said:
> 
> 
> > Sory guys. I'm being really sloppy tinight. Tonight. I have had very servere chronic insomnia for countless years...well over a decade. I go through periods where I just don't sleep for days, and I'm going through one now. After a while, you kind of feel like your drunk, even though your not... The nafter that, if you still haven't slept...yeahhh.......things get really really werid..............
> ...




Heh, sometime. Most of the time, I set up my gear, dila in PA, program an imaging sequene on a target thats just topped the trees, and get guiding going...then start it up aaaaaand....go to bed.  I've got my gear tuned welll enough these days that it can just do it;s thing on its own now. 


I don;t sleep most of the time hen I do that...but at least I'm not up messin around or fretting about the gear/ Spending 5-6 hours in bed is the only rest I usually get. Weekends are uutually the only time I get any actual speep, but according to my sleep studys I don't ever get to stage three...


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## dtaylor (Dec 6, 2014)

neuroanatomist said:


> Roger, I'd like to add my thanks to those of others for your participation here!
> 
> —John



So would I. Roger, I've found your site to be a valuable resource for years. Great to see you here.


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## fragilesi (Dec 6, 2014)

AvTvM said:


> I don't see any reason to be "balanced" if my current supplier delivers subpar product. As in every other business i give them clear warning and tell them what i want. I want the best value for every euro/dollar spent.
> 14% improvements are ridiculous and utterly meaningless to me (u am not into astro photography).
> And What other customers want is totally irrelevant to me as well.
> 
> ...



The best reason for taking a "balanced" approach is that it will give you an accurate answer rather than an impetuous one not based on all the facts. That's always been a good enough reason for me. 

This is why, for example, you've made the mistake of thinking that what other people want is irrelevant. Of course it isn't because it will help shape the priorities of the manufacturers. You might not care what other people want but I find it interesting listening to jrista for example (sorry I don't mean to keep quoting him over others but his posts stick in my mind the most for detail / knowledge on subject at hand). Knowing what he's after, seeing the effects of it has opened my mind to what additional DR might, at times, do for my photography. It's made me more aware of the limitations of what I have and made me think about ways around it - nothing new just techniques people have countered his arguments with.

But at least you agree right now that your Canon is still as good as anyone else's system overall. And if you think about it that's a hell of an achievement given that they aren't giving you the particular aspect you're so interested in. All the other advantages of Canon must be providing a pretty solid argument in your mind.

But, if in the meantime, based on the specs you imagine the A9 will have and how well it will perform why not sell your Canon gear now while you can get a good price for it before everyone starts a fire sale on Canon gear in readiness to move to the new Sony model . . .


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## AvTvM (Dec 6, 2014)

DominoDude said:


> *I will upgrade to a 7D II if it can fully match an upcoming Nikon D400. In terms of sensor/IQ, electronics, performance/responsiveness, and especially AF ... most likely that would mean the 7D II should "inherit" the current 1D IV AF system (45 pt). In addition I would like it to get a tilt-swivel display (like the 60D). If they offer such a camera at $ 1800 launch price it will sell extremely well again and will leave hardly ny room or need for a 70D.*


I can't say that I know how good or bad the Nikon D400 is (if it exists), but your statement above indicates that the 7D Mark II should be good enough for your standards. You even guessed correct on the price.
[/quote]

Look at the date of that posting. had Canon come out with the 7D II in spring of 2013, I would have bought it. 
But now we are at the end of 2014. I am clear, I want an FF sensored cam and I want it without a mirror. 

7D II is certainly a fine DSLR, and iw welll worth it, if one is into reach-limited tele-focused action-oriented Phtoography .. or possibly astrophotography. But I do not see anything that deserves the the word "game changing". Yes, it is an improvement, but in the grand scheme of things it is just another minor iteration of the Canon APS-C mirrorslapper series and their 18/20 MP sensors. 

To me ... a "game cahnging product is "proff of some concept, that was considered hard, if not imposible to achieve. 

Canon game cahngers in my book: 
* 1D ... proof of concept, of a "fully viable professional grade digital camera, offering more than what 135 film ever could.
* Digital Rebel/300D - proof of concept, that digital DSLRs can be offered at "reasonable cost" (sub USD 1000), within reach of consumers/enthusiasts. 
* 5D was a game changer - proof, that FF sensored DSLRs can be built "at reasonable cost" and first time they really came into reach of enthusiasts and semi-pros. 
* 5D II was a game-changer, proof .. HD video can be done with a DSLR; put "shallow field of depth" capability into hands of video entghusiasts, low budget film makers

Since then I have not seen any game-changing cameras from Canon, only iterations, comparatively minor improvements. 
* Sony A7/R/S are game-changers. Proof of concept, that the best, full-blown FF sensors on the market can be put into a body as small as an mFT or APS-C camera. Deemed impossible by many beforehand. ANd passin on some of the cost savings possible with cheaper to built mirrorless cams to the customers.

Let's see, what comes next that truly deserves the badge "game changing".


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## neuroanatomist (Dec 6, 2014)

jrista said:


> Lee Jay said:
> 
> 
> > With all the astro talk and the full moon, I thought I'd mention my favorite new astro accessory - the Canon 10x42L IS. Those things are way better than I ever expected them to be.
> ...



I have the little Canon 10x30 IS binocs, which I got for free. The IS really is quite useful.


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## Lee Jay (Dec 6, 2014)

AvTvM said:


> .
> 
> To me ... a "game cahnging product is "proff of some concept, that was considered hard, if not imposcosting achieve.
> 
> ...



* 7D II is a game-changer, proof .. a professional weather sealed sports camera with a professional frame rate and professional auto focus system can be put into a compact body costing under $2k which is 50-75% less than previous cameras with similar functionality.

The A7s and r? They're just over grown compacts with large sensors. They should cost under $1k and be sold in the checkout line at Walmart.


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## AvTvM (Dec 6, 2014)

Lee Jay said:


> * 7D II is a game-changer, proof .. a professional weather sealed sports camera with a professional frame rate and professional auto focus system can be put into a compact body costing under $2k which is 50-75% less than previous cameras with similar functionality.



no. It costs 100% of the preceding 7D, which has already proven that point and was "borderline game-changing", when it came out in 2009. 

Basically something labeled Mk. II or III by Canon rarely is a game-changer. Exception so far: 5D II for video. ;-)


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## Marsu42 (Dec 6, 2014)

AvTvM said:


> Lee Jay said:
> 
> 
> > * 7D II is a game-changer, proof .. a professional weather sealed sports camera with a professional frame rate and professional auto focus system can be put into a compact body costing under $2k which is 50-75% less than previous cameras with similar functionality.
> ...



Well, "compact body" or not aside, +1 for not accepting every marketing talk. The 7d2 is a fine camera at a still reasonable price (for Canon), and mk1 vs mk2 will result in more keepers due to improved metering and af. It will also have nicer video than previous crop cameras, but still below the 5d3 which also has ML.

But "game-changer" implies you can do something that you couldn't befroe at all - and I don't see it, tbh. Unless you shoot astro, looking over this thread the 7d2 seems to have some "more than a bit" iq improvement for this specific application.

What would be "game-changing" for me is something like:
* in-vf focus peaking and a evf you cannot tell from ovf
* raw and/or 4k video sub $2k
* open firmware that enables 3rd party addons


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## Lee Jay (Dec 6, 2014)

Marsu42 said:


> AvTvM said:
> 
> 
> > Lee Jay said:
> ...



One of those is impossible and the other two are features I wouldn't even consider in my purchase decision.

The 7D didn't have professional AF even for its time. Remember the 45 point system with dedicated AF processor?


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## Marsu42 (Dec 6, 2014)

Lee Jay said:


> Marsu42 said:
> 
> 
> > What would be "game-changing" for me is something like:
> ...



You think an open firmware is impossible? Only by Canon's current policy, but they are free to release a sdk at any time to enable ML-like development w/o reverse engineering.

Concerning your purchase decisions: "game-changing" doesn't depend on if you personally want it or not, but if it enables a new range of possibilities in general. And with evolving technology, better evf and high-iq video will reach the consumer sooner or later.


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## Lee Jay (Dec 6, 2014)

Marsu42 said:


> Lee Jay said:
> 
> 
> > Marsu42 said:
> ...



No, I think an EVF you cannot tell from an OVF is impossible.


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## Marsu42 (Dec 6, 2014)

Lee Jay said:


> Marsu42 said:
> 
> 
> > Lee Jay said:
> ...



Considering the history of technology and what has been deemed impossible, this is a rather courageous statement


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## Lee Jay (Dec 6, 2014)

Marsu42 said:


> Lee Jay said:
> 
> 
> > Marsu42 said:
> ...



No, it's fundamental physics. An EVF requires dual integration (one for the sensor, one for your eyes). An OVF does not.


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## LetTheRightLensIn (Dec 6, 2014)

dtaylor said:


> LetTheRightLensIn said:
> 
> 
> > And it's interesting that some improvements for astro photography are awesome (and they are) but then if say some landscape (not that only landscape shooters can benefit) shooter is looking for a 3 stops improvement, that's just minor nonsense and it's all on the photographer, people have made great pics forever so why should they even care, it just says something about the photographer doesn't it.
> ...



1. an extra 2-3 stops over what Canon delivers now actually would make a big difference for a lot of the shots where it matters at all. It's exactly what you'd need to pull off many dappled forest scenes and such, even if it won't cover every single HDR shot.

2. those GNDs only work for a very, very few simple types of scenes. They are totally useless for most scenes including virtually any forest scene or any of the jrista interior type shots. They are good for the classic ground/horizon/air, water/horizon/air shots and not much else.

3. multi-shot HDR can work in more scenarios, but it doesn't work out that nicely when there is motion be it from water, a breeze or subject's own motion. It also tends to require slow tripod work (you can sometimes do hand-held, but it tends to leave at least some weird artifacts here and there that can be a beast to clean up; even if you can always avoid that somehow, it not too uncommonly will put the longest exposed frame into the danger zone for handshake motion blur) and more time in all cases. Sometimes when the light is changing fast that means you miss a lot of different potential takes on an area. Other times it might meaning annoying others you are with or yourself and cut down enjoyment of the wonderful view.




> If you're into sports, the 7D II's AF and buffer make a real difference. If you're into astro, it's sensor characteristics apparently make a notable difference. If you're into landscapes...well...for all the words spilled on the Internet over DR and DxO I'm not sure it has ever actually resulted in a print that's observably better then another print. It's hard to even make the tripod/hand held argument when you can easily hand hold 2-3 frame brackets with no IS, and 5-7 with the latest IS lenses.



LOL how typical. Every single thing the Canon is best at makes a real difference, but anything it's not absolutely doesn't matter expect just barely at all in the only the most extreme scenarios. LOL. How typical.

Nevermind that such serious level of astro photography is even a thing carried out far more rarely by the average user than high HDR regular shooting at low ISO and that the improvement it brings over the previous model is arguably not even quite as noticeable as exmor vs canon for low ISO high DR. But of course since the 7D2 improves the astro bit it's a critical improvement and since they didn't fix the low ISO DR thing that's a minor thing barely relevant to anyone and even to those it is, it still isn't really relevant anyway. Nice.

Listen I've said the 7D2 buffer,fps, AF should make it a beast for that stuff. And the improvements over the prior model for astro look cool. But so would have an improvement for low ISO DR (although the 7D2 can maybe get away without a bit more easily than say a 5D4 could).




> I am curious as to what Canon's management thinks of DxO and DR, if anything.


They seem to be trying to ignore it (witness Maesada's interview where he plays the clueless fool who has never heard of DxO or that Canon DSLR sensors are behind competition in any way).



> And for the record I would love to see this improved. I just don't understand the obsession with it.
> There's less difference today between the "weakest" sensor in an entry level, small format (m43, APS-C, FF) ILC and the best sensors in the most expensive small format ILCs then ever before. Yet some how we are spending more time talking about those differences, and people (not you specifically, nor jrista)



When it comes to low ISO DR the differences are actually greater in recent years than in years past, not lesser.



> on the Internet are becoming more arrogant about the performance of "their" sensor. It gets annoying, which is why you see the push back you are complaining about.



Personally I saw the bashing 'pushback' start first and then after a long time of that many either stopped posting or starting pushing back at defenders of the sacred honor of Canon after getting sick of all the personal insults being tossed for years. I was a bit sad to see Roger even start heading down that line, even if more gently than many, by appearing to call out any photographer who had a need for exmor-like low ISO DR and coming awfully close to the old learn how to shoot you crappy photographer, but having nothing but praise for his own type who liked the dark current improvements.


----------



## jrista (Dec 6, 2014)

Lee Jay said:


> Marsu42 said:
> 
> 
> > Lee Jay said:
> ...




I agree here...I don't think it is possible for an EVF to perform well enough that you couldn't differentiate it from an OVF. Too many things that would push physics too far.


----------



## Marsu42 (Dec 6, 2014)

jrista said:


> I agree here...I don't think it is possible for an EVF to perform well enough that you couldn't differentiate it from an OVF. Too many things that would push physics too far.



It's no surprise we tend to be in agreement about the awesomeness of a *real* optics vf - after all, we're Canon shooters :->.

So let me change my game-changer "cannot tell an evf from an ovf" to "an evf so good it'll even make the most die-hard old-school photogs switch". I imagine it's more a matter of habit like with so many things, as long as you don't run out of batteries. Given enough features, the difference won't matter - or otherwise people would still shoot *real* film no matter the fancy digital stuff.


----------



## LetTheRightLensIn (Dec 6, 2014)

jrista said:


> Lee Jay said:
> 
> 
> > Marsu42 said:
> ...



8k, stereo, HDR, 120fps, extreme wide gamut EVF might get close; not feasible now, but I'd imagine it will be in time

Anyway, in some ways even what can be done now (although hasn't yet) could make an EVF bring quite some pluses over an OVF for some types of shooting (one thing to keep in mind is that most stills are still taken as 2D not 3D and the 3D OVF can give one a rather different impression of what the 2D shoot will look like just due to that alone) although in other cases yeah I'm not sure it would cut it.


----------



## Lee Jay (Dec 6, 2014)

Marsu42 said:


> jrista said:
> 
> 
> > I agree here...I don't think it is possible for an EVF to perform well enough that you couldn't differentiate it from an OVF. Too many things that would push physics too far.
> ...



EVFs would have to have an advantage, which they don't except for video and manual focusing.

The film/digital analogy doesn't work - digital DOES have advantages over film, namely much higher QE and the ability to change ISO on the fly.


----------



## Marsu42 (Dec 6, 2014)

Lee Jay said:


> EVFs would have to have an advantage, which they don't except for video and manual focusing.



With respect, just because you cannot think of any other advantages, it doesn't mean there isn't. With an electronic vf, all image processing, annotation and enhancement that can be done with software is possible. That doesn't mean that current evf implementations implement these.

Here's an interesting link for further research to broaden your imagination  ... http://lmgtfy.com/?q=electronic+viewfinder+advantage



Lee Jay said:


> The film/digital analogy doesn't work - digital DOES have advantages over film, namely much higher QE and the ability to change ISO on the fly.



Right, I'd love to compare the arguments against the switch to the first digital cameras back then to the "we don't want any of your fancy mirrorless stuff, thank you very much" now. 

In the diffusion of innovations, that makes you a "laggard", preferring steam engines, black and white tv sets and analog monitors. Nothing wrong with that, mind you. For all of these obsolete items you can find perfectly valid reasons to delay or refuse any switch because they have properties that matter to your personal preference.


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## candc (Dec 6, 2014)

There are a lot of benifits to an evf. Most importantly you are monitoring the sensor. No more afma bullshit. look at how many posts and threads there are here about that. You can pretty much see in the dark, if you are shooting b&w then that's what you see in the finder


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## dtaylor (Dec 6, 2014)

LetTheRightLensIn said:


> 1. an extra 2-3 stops over what Canon delivers now actually would make a big difference for a lot of the shots where it matters at all. It's exactly what you'd need to pull off many dappled forest scenes and such, even if it won't cover every single HDR shot.



It really isn't. That's why people struggle to produce meaningful real world examples whenever this debate comes up. It's easy to underexpose the corner of a bedroom by 5ev. Not so easy to produce a pair of publishable images where the Canon just had to have bracketing while the Sony did not.



> 2. those GNDs only work for a very, very few simple types of scenes. They are totally useless for most scenes including virtually any forest scene or any of the jrista interior type shots.



Why do you think this is a counter argument in the age of HDR?



> 3. multi-shot HDR can work in more scenarios, but it doesn't work out that nicely when there is motion be it from water, a breeze or subject's own motion.



It's rare that this is a problem. Extremely rare. Shooting through tall grass in the wind with the sun directly behind the grass rare. Except...Exmor cannot handle that in one frame either.



> It also tends to require slow tripod work (you can sometimes do hand-held, but it tends to leave at least some weird artifacts here and there that can be a beast to clean up;



I don't know where you're getting this. Hand held is stupid easy with a fast DSLR, especially with IS.



> LOL how typical. Every single thing the Canon is best at makes a real difference, but anything it's not absolutely doesn't matter expect just barely at all in the only the most extreme scenarios.



Nice strawman.


----------



## dtaylor (Dec 6, 2014)

Lee Jay said:


> EVFs would have to have an advantage, which they don't except for video and manual focusing.



EVFs are awesome for exposure. You can shoot in M and reliably, consistently nail the exposures you want no matter how complex the scene or lighting. And you are a better judge of what you want then any AE algorithm.


----------



## scyrene (Dec 6, 2014)

Lee Jay said:


> With all the astro talk and the full moon, I thought I'd mention my favorite new astro accessory - the Canon 10x42L IS. Those things are way better than I ever expected them to be.



I have the 18x50 IS binoculars and they exceeded my expectations too


----------



## Lee Jay (Dec 7, 2014)

scyrene said:


> Lee Jay said:
> 
> 
> > With all the astro talk and the full moon, I thought I'd mention my favorite new astro accessory - the Canon 10x42L IS. Those things are way better than I ever expected them to be.
> ...



I've tried all of them (literally). I have the 18x50s and 15x50s at work. The 10x42s just blow them all away, and my second favorite are the 12x36IIs.


----------



## raptor3x (Dec 7, 2014)

LetTheRightLensIn said:


> 8k, stereo, HDR, 120fps, extreme wide gamut EVF might get close; not feasible now, but I'd imagine it will be in time
> 
> Anyway, in some ways even what can be done now (although hasn't yet) could make an EVF bring quite some pluses over an OVF for some types of shooting (one thing to keep in mind is that most stills are still taken as 2D not 3D and the 3D OVF can give one a rather different impression of what the 2D shoot will look like just due to that alone) although in other cases yeah I'm not sure it would cut it.



For me, the most exciting aspects of the EVF are that they should be able to make them obnoxiously large (OM-1 size or even larger) and that I can imagine the potential to make "mirror" blackout almost imperceptible. I've been excited about the possibility of the gigantic VF ever since my first EVF in an ancient Canon S3 IS.


----------



## Lee Jay (Dec 7, 2014)

raptor3x said:


> For me, the most exciting aspects of the EVF are that they should be able to make them obnoxiously large (OM-1 size or even larger) and that I can imagine the potential to make "mirror" blackout almost imperceptible. I've been excited about the possibility of the gigantic VF ever since my first EVF in an ancient Canon S3 IS.



If a gigantic VF is what you want, buy a Hoodman Hoodloupe 3 and put in on your SLR's LCD. If you think a magnified 1/2" EVF is big, try a magnified 3".


----------



## sdsr (Dec 7, 2014)

NancyP said:


> BTW, Sony fans, IBIS may be great for many commonly used focal length lenses, but it is severely challenged when using supertelephoto lenses.



Perhaps, but even if IBIS is less effective for longer lenses, it will surely be better than nothing (it will be nice to get some sort of stabilization for my Canon 135L). And if the lens has IS you can decide to use that instead, just as you can now when attaching Panasonic lenses to Olympus bodies (apparently Sony's IBIS works in conjunction with, rather than as an alternative to, the IS in Sony lenses).


----------



## sdsr (Dec 7, 2014)

Lee Jay said:


> The A7s and r? They're just over grown compacts with large sensors. They should cost under $1k and be sold in the checkout line at Walmart.



I hope writing that made you feel better.


----------



## fragilesi (Dec 7, 2014)

LetTheRightLensIn said:


> LOL how typical. Every single thing the Canon is best at makes a real difference, but anything it's not absolutely doesn't matter expect just barely at all in the only the most extreme scenarios. LOL. How typical.



This is a nutshell is where we're all going wrong. Everyone likes to play the victim on the Internet fora these days whenever someone disagrees with them and we end up with the sarcasm from other posts about "worship" of a brand or Marsu42's "laggard" stuff and Simpsons pictures - amusing as it was . Can't we just discuss these things? (And yes DRoners was a reverse example, I'm not suggesting it's one-sided)

I don't know how many times many of us have said it in terms of the DR question on the sensors. We get it, we understand why you want it. We are not belittling it. So let's just get that straight. We might not see it as the huge "game changer" that you do but we do see it. I would like it, there I said it . . . again.

All that said I do think that the 7dII is a fine achievement. I struggle to understand why putting an extra stop or two of DR in a camera at this price range makes it a "game changer" despite other obvious weaknesses while at the same time putting a professional grade AF system, improved metering, beast like FPS, flicker free lighting capability etc etc in a sport / action camera at that price level is not. How can that make any kind of sense?

Because I like action photography Canon has the right priorities for me but on top of that it looks like there will be full frame models in 2015. Let's see what they have been doing there before we judge. Some of the features on the 7dII were not even guessed at and even with these cameras it's obvious that Canon have been working on sensor tech albeit incrementally.


----------



## Marsu42 (Dec 7, 2014)

fragilesi said:


> This is a nutshell is where we're all going wrong. Everyone likes to play the victim on the Internet fora these days whenever someone disagrees with them and we end up with the sarcasm from other posts about "worship" of a brand or Marsu42's "laggard" stuff and Simpsons pictures - amusing as it was . Can't we just discuss these things?



The term "laggard" is not sarcasm, it's social science and as "discussing things" as it goes! The diffusion of innovations is well researched, I should know, I wrote my diploma about it  ... for the basics see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion_of_innovations







It's about different kinds of people adopting new technology and trickling down this information via social channels - the very thing that's happening right now right here. Innovation can stop at any time, not everything is adopted or replaces the old tech entirely.

Unsurprisingly, this Canon forum follows the Canon brand design - it's rather conservative and definitely isn't a stronghold of innovators or even early adopters. This is neither a "good" or "bad" thing, just an observation and it explains the reluctance about new camera designs. Heck, even Magic Lantern isn't widespread among Canon users even if its features beats most other camera systems out there.

As for the comics: Well, I can't help it, discussions on CR aren't exactly a serious issue for me and some situations simply remind me of a Simpsons scene. Though I hope they help to lighten the mood a bit


----------



## dtaylor (Dec 7, 2014)

Marsu42 said:


> Unsurprisingly, this Canon forum follows the Canon brand design - it's rather conservative and definitely isn't a stronghold of innovators or even early adopters. This is neither a "good" or "bad" thing, just an observation and it explains the reluctance about new camera designs. Heck, even Magic Lantern isn't widespread among Canon users even if its features beats most other camera systems out there.



Another place where debate goes wrong is when one side tries to explain the other side's disagreement as something other then honest and reasoned disagreement. You see this in politics all the time when side A declares side B is against XYZ because B is evil.

No one here has ever said they are against more low ISO DR. They just don't feel the difference is as large or meaningful as those who continually ask for it.


----------



## meywd (Dec 7, 2014)

Marsu42 said:


> fragilesi said:
> 
> 
> > This is a nutshell is where we're all going wrong. Everyone likes to play the victim on the Internet fora these days whenever someone disagrees with them and we end up with the sarcasm from other posts about "worship" of a brand or Marsu42's "laggard" stuff and Simpsons pictures - amusing as it was . Can't we just discuss these things?
> ...



Yeah took a course on start-ups at a start-up incubator and they talked about this chart, though you can't apply it to magic lantern because it is not a complete product, if it was a company with a dedicated team and there was support and a stable product then it would spread more, btw both my cameras has ML and i love it, but living on the bleeding edge is not easy, if i didn't try it on the 600D i would never risk trying it on the 5D III, and still i searched the ML forums for a bit of assurances that although its not a guarantee most of it is stable before i installed it.

As for the sarcasm, i agree its better to tone it down in general, however i do enjoy your posts


----------



## scyrene (Dec 7, 2014)

Lee Jay said:


> scyrene said:
> 
> 
> > Lee Jay said:
> ...



Fair enough! I like how the 18s have a similar field of view to my camera at 1000mm, gives me a good idea what to expect.


----------



## AvTvM (Dec 7, 2014)

if ML was fully endorsed by Canon, a much higher percentage of Canon owners would probably install it on their Canon cameras. 

I for one would never put unsupported third-party firmware on any electronic device. Especially not, when I am told by the manufacturer that it voids warranty on the product. And I also do not open iPhones oder disassemble Canon cameras physically. I am not Roger Cicala .. I would not get it back together and working again. ;D

And I guess the majority of Canon users handles it the same way.


----------



## scyrene (Dec 7, 2014)

AvTvM said:


> if ML was fully endorsed by Canon, a much higher percentage of Canon owners would probably install it on their Canon cameras.
> 
> I for one would never put unsupported third-party firmware on any electronic device. Especially not, when I am told by the manufacturer that it voids warranty on the product. And I also do not open iPhones oder disassemble Canon cameras physically. I am not Roger Cicala .. I would not get it back together and working again. ;D
> 
> And I guess the majority of Canon users handles it the same way.



I'm sure others can confirm this, but I thought Canon explicitly said installing ML does _not _ void warranties?


----------



## Don Haines (Dec 7, 2014)

AvTvM said:


> if ML was fully endorsed by Canon, a much higher percentage of Canon owners would probably install it on their Canon cameras.
> 
> I for one would never put unsupported third-party firmware on any electronic device. Especially not, when I am told by the manufacturer that it voids warranty on the product. And I also do not open iPhones oder disassemble Canon cameras physically. I am not Roger Cicala .. I would not get it back together and working again. ;D
> 
> And I guess the majority of Canon users handles it the same way.



Personally, I laugh at "no serviceable parts inside" stickers.... and yes, I have opened cameras and iPhones and replaced parts.... but then, that's part of what I do for a living and there are microscopes and surface mount soldering stations in the lab


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## Marsu42 (Dec 7, 2014)

AvTvM said:


> I for one would never put unsupported third-party firmware on any electronic device. Especially not, when I am told by the manufacturer that it voids warranty on the product.



You're not speaking of ML, are you? Canon has never stated ML voids the warranty (and even if they'd have a hard time actually enforcing it), and there has not been any case of Canon service bitching that ML is installed when repairing a camera. Btw you can uninstall ML at any time.



AvTvM said:


> And I guess the majority of Canon users handles it the same way.



Your bad, but on the other hand, that makes fewer Canon users with 14+ ev dynamic range, and me the only Canon shooter on the planet with working flash + auto iso (stock fw locks iso to 400) and ec in m outside the 1dx :->


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## meywd (Dec 7, 2014)

Marsu42 said:


> Your bad, but on the other hand, that makes fewer Canon users with 14+ ev dynamic range, and me the only Canon shooter on the planet with working flash + auto iso (stock fw locks iso to 400) and ec in m outside the 1dx :->



Can you explain please, locks iso to 400?


----------



## Marsu42 (Dec 7, 2014)

meywd said:


> Can you explain please, locks iso to 400?



1. set camera to auto iso ("A")
2. look at iso display - varies with lighting
3. enable flash
4. look at iso display - stuck at 400 (at least w/ all Canon cameras I came across)


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## meywd (Dec 7, 2014)

Marsu42 said:


> meywd said:
> 
> 
> > Can you explain please, locks iso to 400?
> ...



You are correct ???


----------



## candc (Dec 7, 2014)

Is regular ml different from nightly builds? The only download link I can find is for nightly builds and that sounds like beta?


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## Marsu42 (Dec 7, 2014)

candc said:


> Is regular ml different from nightly builds? The only download link I can find is for nightly builds and that sounds like beta?



Gotcha - there is no regular ml, nightly is the new stable due to a lack of dev resources. But it's tested a lot esp. on 5d3, and development has moved back into branches and pull requests.

https://bitbucket.org/hudson/magic-lantern/commits/all
https://bitbucket.org/hudson/magic-lantern/branches
https://bitbucket.org/hudson/magic-lantern/pull-requests


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## candc (Dec 7, 2014)

Thanks, I will give it a try. The dual ISO feature sounds great. I think you lose some detail in the highlights but that's better than no detail because its blown out


----------



## meywd (Dec 8, 2014)

GraFax said:


> I have to admit that ML makes me a bit nervous. I get the risk/reward for Video shooters. Just not sure it's worth the agro for stills. People seem to love it though, so I guess I'm missing out. Is there still a staple 5D2 build? Maybe I'll try that sometime to see how it is. Do you keep ML on the same card you write files to on the 5D3?
> 
> Oh well, I think ML is for the cool kids; "I used to be with It, Then they changed what It was"



Why I use it?

Intervalometer/bulb: for timelapse, bulb shots above 30s,,,,
MLU: mirror lockup on timer shots
Focus Peak: Manual lenses are really tough, and i have a bad vision
Advance Bracket: on the 600D more than on the 5D III for HDR
Dual ISO: still testing it, but so far i like it a lot
Shutter Count: includes actuations


----------



## East Wind Photography (Dec 8, 2014)

GraFax said:


> I have to admit that ML makes me a bit nervous. I get the risk/reward for Video shooters. Just not sure it's worth the agro for stills. People seem to love it though, so I guess I'm missing out. Is there still a staple 5D2 build? Maybe I'll try that sometime to see how it is. Do you keep ML on the same card you write files to on the 5D3?
> 
> Oh well, I think ML is for the cool kids; "I used to be with It, Then they changed what It was"



I've been using it on my 5D3 since it was available for it. I've never had a crash or an instance where I had to pull the battery or reset it. The original canon firmware is still there, just hit menu and you can do all of the factory stuff just as you did.

There are only two downsides, 1) slower wakeup time from sleep mode 2) with some of the features turned on like focus peaking, realtime histograms and the like, it does use a little more battery since the CPU is running at a higher rate. However if those features are useful to you it's worth it.

Other than that I have seen no downside to it. I use Dual-ISO quite often now at times when I normally would just give up such as during noon sun or when shooting directly toward the sun. Great for landscapes too.


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## East Wind Photography (Dec 8, 2014)

candc said:


> Thanks, I will give it a try. The dual ISO feature sounds great. I think you lose some detail in the highlights but that's better than no detail because its blown out



With a properly exposed Dual ISO you dont lose that much and the shadow detail while less res is actually much more pleasing since the noise is reduced lower on the DR scale.


----------



## East Wind Photography (Dec 8, 2014)

GraFax said:


> East Wind Photography said:
> 
> 
> > GraFax said:
> ...



You can LL format and ML puts itself back on the card. Kind of like a friendly computer virus. It is easy to remove now. Just flash the firmware again and wait 30 seconds for it to remove itself and restore the boot flag back to the factory setting.

I have done that only a couple of times to test the wake on sleep delays and the uninstall gets rid of the delay so if you end up not really liking it you do have a quick way out.


----------



## raptor3x (Dec 8, 2014)

GraFax said:


> I guess I should give it a try. The Dual ISO does sound promising. I'm in the habit of frequently formatting my cards. Do you erase the old files from the EOS folder manually? Or do you keep ML on an SD card? I suppose I should visit the site and read the FAQ again.



In case you didn't see it, I did a comparison between a Sony A7 and a DualISO 5D3 a couple months ago.


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## East Wind Photography (Dec 8, 2014)

raptor3x said:


> GraFax said:
> 
> 
> > I guess I should give it a try. The Dual ISO does sound promising. I'm in the habit of frequently formatting my cards. Do you erase the old files from the EOS folder manually? Or do you keep ML on an SD card? I suppose I should visit the site and read the FAQ again.
> ...



Comparing apples to oranges again. .


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## Marsu42 (Dec 8, 2014)

candc said:


> The dual ISO feature sounds great. I think you lose some detail in the highlights but that's better than no detail because its blown out



Surprisingly, the post-procssing tool cr2hdr is very good at interpolating and re-constructing the detail in deep highlight or shadows - you only realize there's a difference in test chart shots or when some detail is only a horizontal scanline wide.

The drawback with dual_iso is the wb is broken and you have to guess in post, and that you only have an interlaced shot in camera as a preview.


----------



## fragilesi (Dec 8, 2014)

Marsu42 said:


> The term "laggard" is not sarcasm, it's social science and as "discussing things" as it goes! The diffusion of innovations is well researched, I should know, I wrote my diploma about it  ... for the basics see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion_of_innovations
> 
> 
> 
> ...



That's interesting stuff but as with all specialisms it's dangerous to take a word in common usage and attribute some specific, objective quantity to it and then expect to be understood. A laggard in common parlance is still simply "a person who makes slow progress and falls behind others". That's not appropriate here as most of us are well ahead of the average when it comes to digital photography, the techniques it involves and up to date tech. I think that must be a fundamental flaw in using that term to this audience in any sense.

And blindly following "innovation" is not a good thing either as our history proves in spades. I work in IT, and I know that early adopters have quality issues. I'm happy to let them get on with it, seek out the best and then run along afterwards protecting the many thousands of users we serve from nightmare scenarios that others regularly walk into. We give better service as a result. There's simply no question about it in my mind.

ML - I like the idea but as an ex-software developer I would not be an early adopter if they ever make it available for the 70D. As I've said in the past, I value reliability, the achievement of which takes significant innovation and investment. I have no problem with open source but sadly their excellent project has obvious problems and it would be foolish to risk my camera and / or scarce photography time even for the kind of improvements it offers.

You might see all that as "conservative" but certainly I think it's a long distance from "laggard". I don't really mind either way; I believe I will make the most progress with my photography in this manner rather than chasing the latest thing that will make it "easy" which is what a lot of what we are talking about involves.


----------



## Marsu42 (Dec 8, 2014)

fragilesi said:


> That's interesting stuff but as with all specialisms it's dangerous to take a word in common usage and attribute some specific, objective quantity to it and then expect to be understood.



The term "laggard" is certainly not in my common usage, I wouldn't know about other people. I'm not a native English speaker and have never heard of it before until reading the original version of Roger's therory of diffusion of innovations.

Thanks for the explanation though, but imho it's expecting too much to participate in a English spoken forum with international audience and put that much weight onto individual words.



fragilesi said:


> And blindly following "innovation" is not a good thing either as our history proves in spades. I work in IT, and I know that early adopters have quality issues.



The different adopter groups are not in a hierarchy of being smart or not, but simply in the order they adopt an innovation (or where the innovation stops to progress.). I'm not an innovator myself, and hardly an early adopter - I've bough too much "banana ware" and know what a reliable product is worth.



fragilesi said:


> ML - I like the idea but as an ex-software developer I would not be an early adopter if they ever make it available for the 70D.



Porting ML to the 70d doesn't mean re-writing the software, but simply finding the firmware hooks of Canon's DryOS to make it compatible - and probably fix things in ML Canon has changed in the 70d. But the general quality of the codebase remains the same.

Comparison: If you have a 580ex2 flash on the 60d, it won't get worse because you stick it on the 70d. The ML devs are very cautious when declaring new ports working, but if you want to be an "innovator" and use unstable pre-nightly builds of course you're a beta-tester.


----------



## dolina (Dec 8, 2014)

This is a forum of a rumor site. People who follow "news" on product releases generally are first adopters.

As for the logo of the site, perhaps CR guy does not want to spend on a innovative and ground breaking design. Money's better spent keeping our free forum FREE. 

When using technical terms preface it as such or the general public will default to primary dictionary or cultural definition.

ML is nice and all but it requires a level of sophistication and gumption few posses. I was told that CPS voids the warranty of bodies with ML installed if it is brought in for repairs. I am unsure if they refuse to repair it. That very fact restrains me from installing it.

As for Canon products in general I rarely see production/design defects coming from them in over a decade's use of their digital cameras. Apple on the other hand I am glad to wait for the "S" model than the "non-S" model. iPhones are often so advance that the features they have drain battery faster and have limited support by my telco until 12 months from release.

DxO says the sensor aint that good. It doesn't matter to me as what is important is that it is superior as a whole to the original 7D




fragilesi said:


> Marsu42 said:
> 
> 
> > The term "laggard" is not sarcasm, it's social science and as "discussing things" as it goes! The diffusion of innovations is well researched, I should know, I wrote my diploma about it  ... for the basics see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion_of_innovations
> ...


----------



## Marsu42 (Dec 8, 2014)

dolina said:


> ML is nice and all but it requires a level of sophistication and gumption few posses. I was told that CPS voids the warranty of bodies with ML installed if it is brought in for repairs. I am unsure if they refuse to repair it. That very fact restrains me from installing it



Told by who? This is total bs and "fud", Canon has never stated this, and there is no case known when they refused repair because of ML. Btw ML is on your cf/sd *card*, the only thing changed in camera is a flag that loads ML *if* the card is in the camera and *if* the ML files are on it.

And you can uninstall this ML flag at any time, the the only time Canon would recognize at all (if they wanted it, which they don't) is when your camera is completely unresponsive so cannot tell ML to remove itself.


----------



## fragilesi (Dec 8, 2014)

Marsu42 said:


> The term "laggard" is certainly not in my common usage, I wouldn't know about other people. I'm not a native English speaker and have never heard of it before until reading the original version of Roger's therory of diffusion of innovations.
> 
> Thanks for the explanation though, but imho it's expecting too much to participate in a English spoken forum with international audience and put that much weight onto individual words.



To be honest you only have yourself to blame on this one. Your post certainly gave the impression you were well-versed in the meaning and your English is so damn good I would never have guessed that you were not a native speaker. I work via e-mail with people from around the globe and thought I was good at spotting them too! In fact you put several of us "natives" to shame. 

On top of all that you've used a term I've never heard before but will certainly do so in the future - banana-ware! 

All that said I don't think that your comparison of using a flash on different cameras is a valid one. Canon will test for backwards compatibility with devices knowing their own code inside out. ML are just some guys doing their best, and their best sounds damn good, don't get me wrong. This means they won't understand what is happening in the differences between the 70d and previous models or the intention behind the changes. It's a very different scenario as I think most software developers would agree.


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## Marsu42 (Dec 8, 2014)

fragilesi said:


> To be honest you only have yourself to blame on this one.



Not exactly, because I don't feel any need to excuse or take back anything I wrote, just to clear up misunderstandings. But I will make it my declared strategy to write (even) worse English in the future, I just started in another thread throwing in the occasional "Ja!" or "Nein!". Afaik there are other well known German words like "Verboten!" :->



fragilesi said:


> On top of all that you've used a term I've never heard before but will certainly do so in the future - banana-ware!



It's the direct translation of a German term, "ripens after being sold", but I guess you got what it means w/o further explanation.


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## fragilesi (Dec 9, 2014)

Marsu42 said:


> fragilesi said:
> 
> 
> > To be honest you only have yourself to blame on this one.
> ...



I just want to be clear, my comments were only meant as compliments about your English language skills.


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## East Wind Photography (Dec 9, 2014)

East Wind Photography said:


> Bundu said:
> 
> 
> > Don Haines said:
> ...



Just a follow up that the sky watcher mount is now available at B&H. You have to order some things seperately but its still cheaper than having it shipped from Canada unless you are Canadian!

http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1092106-REG/sky_watcher_s20510_star_adventurer_motorized_mount.html


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## East Wind Photography (Dec 18, 2014)

I just received the sky watcher star adventurer product from B&H. Looks very well designed with a lot of thought going into it's usefulness. I'm impressed with the size and weight. Will be easy to travel with. The declination bracket can also hold a second ball head mount for a guiding scope and autotracker. 

The declination bracket also has a worm type fine adjuster. I would imaging it would be fairly easy to construct a motor that would allow for some kind of declination autotracking. Though I doubt it would be needed for most digital imagery.

I haven't had a chance to take it out yet. Maybe next week. All of this is fine but if it cant track as described it's not worth anything.


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