A cautionary tale

New, it seems, is not always better. In the mega-pixel DSLR war (which seems to have gone nuts again after a period of relative calm), the following quote from the highly-respected DPreview.com on it's newly posted review of the new Canon 50D, the sister model (not replacement, we are told) to both Gareth's and Damian's 40D.

"RAW noise

Finally let's take a look a the raw output of the EOS50D next to the ten megapixel 40D. Removing any in-camera noise reduction and processing the images using Adobe Camera Raw (without NR) gives us the nearest thing to a 'level playing field' for assessing the relative noise levels of the two cameras' sensors. Despite the fact that the 50D is the newer camera it shows visibly more chroma and luminance noise than the 40D. Considering the 50D's much more tightly packed sensor (4.5 MP/cm² vs 3.1 MP/cm² on the 40D) this comes hardly as a surprise. It would have been unreasonable to expect Canon's engineers to overcome the laws of physics."

At 15MP, there is clearly not much room for movement on the pixel/interference/noise front vs the 10MP 40D. My new 450D (12MP) seems to be virtually identical to the old 350D, but it may show some signs of increased noise at higher ISOs. Thankfully, I don't use them that much, and the RAW software handles noise (chroma and luminance) very well, so no difference in effect to the 8MP 350D. Phew. However, it's clearly on/near it's limit at 12 for APS-C sensors, so 15 is clearly tipped over the edge. It has to be said that it's all good up to about 800, so no impact if you have a 50D, but clearly it's having to work harder for about the same/less image quality. For a shed load more money. Hmmm.

For us lot, if we did want more pixels (for larger prints or more flexibility in cropping) then it has to full size sensor, so the 5D MkII at 21MP is the clear choice, but that's the price of a decent second-hand car.

Ivan