Canon EOS 1D Mark III

Canon EOS 1D Mark III - ISO tests

September 11, 2013

Last night I shot a sequence of ISO test images for my 5Dii camera, and now I am repeating the exercise for the 1Diii.

Canon 5Dii ISO tests

Here is the full test image. This is a 3888 by 2592 pixel image downsized to 800x533. My 1Diii was on a tripod with the 100mm f/2.8 macro lens, set to f/16. I shot tethered and pulled the raw files directly into Lightroom 5. I did the conversion to JPEG using default settings, no sharpening or adjustments.

If you compare this to last nights overall image, you will see that it is cropped a bit tighter. This is due to the 1.3 crop sensor in the 1D camera. I used pretty much the same camera setup and lens to subject distance as in the 5Dii tests, my aim being to get images that I could readily compare to the 5D for different ISO settings.

The following images are 640 by 480 pixel crops pulled from the 3888 by 2592 pixel images. They show the noise at 1:1 with no sharpening or contrast adjustment of any kind.

I present two sets of image, the first set for the 1D Mark III alone, then images showing results from the 5Dii alongside the 1Diii for the same ISO setting.

Conclusions

In a nutshell, the 1Diii has noise levels virtually identical to the 5Dii. The difference between the two cameras (aside from build and ergonomics) is the pixel count, one is a 22 megapixel camera, the other is a 10.1 megapixel camera.

Just as with the 5Dii, I feel confident using ISO 400 on a routine basis, and without much hesitation will use ISO 800 as well.

The almost identical performance is a bit surprising given that the 1Diii is a slightly older camera with larger 8.4 micron pixels. The 5Dii has 6.3 micron pixels. If I want to make really big prints, I should use the 5Dii.

Like the 5Dii, ISO 50 is apparently an artificial ISO generated by digital manipulation inside the camera, as is the ISO 6400 setting.

ISO 100 and 200 follow: