I headed out this morning to do some sunrise shooting but was thwarted by an overcast sky and cold winds, and ended up coming home with only about a dozen shots.  The day cleared, however, and I was back out this evening at twilight for a spectacular evening.  While I was out, I made sure to repeat my ISO performance test, this time with a “real-world” outdoor scene.

ISO 100

ISO 200

ISO 400

ISO 800

ISO 1600

ISO 3200

ISO 6400

ISO 12800

Unlike the indoor scene, which was fairly evenly lit, this scene suffers from the reality of shooting outdoors; the sun is setting and some elements are still in the direct light while others have fallen into shadow.  It’s a full dynamic range and as such, the noise starts appearing somewhat earlier.  As before, these images are straight from the camera, except for being resized to 72 dpi and run through Save For Web, so I could upload them here.  No tonal adjustments whatsoever have been applied, and in-camera noise reduction is disabled.  All were shot with the Canon 7D + 28-135mm @ f/8.

ISO 100 – 200 are beautiful; the colors are clean and rich and there’s good detail visible.  Since landscape photographers have the luxury of fairly stable subjects, there’s little reason you’d ever need a higher ISO, so long as you have a tripod with you.

At ISO 400 there is some noise starting to creep into the darker shadow areas along the grass and in the trees, but it is subtle and does not detract from the image.  At ISO 800 there is noise appearing more or less throughout the image, even in the sky.  By ISO 1600 there’s even more throughout the image, but it still isn’t a photo-killer.  Since it is fine-grained noise, it isn’t as ugly as the noise on other cameras, like the 50D.  I’d still say that 1600 is usable, although it certainly wouldn’t be my first choice.

ISO 3200 shows moderate levels of noise throughout the image and would definitely benefit from noise reduction software.  Even after reduction, it might not be usable for high-end commercial work.  Likewise, ISO 6400 is simply bad; the noise is very visible and detracts from the image.

ISO 12800, as should be expected, is terrible.  Frankly, at this point this level of sensitivity is something of a marketing gimmick – there’s no real practical use for this setting, it just sounds cool on the spec list.  You may not want to even turn the ISO expansion on and if you do, reserve ISO 12800 for sightings of Bigfoot and UFOs.  And even then, expect people to be suspicious of the poor quality.

I’ll reiterate what I said in the rest of the review: I am very impressed with the EOS 7D and absolutely love shooting with it.  There is a marked difference from the 50D series cameras and the combination of new features and performance makes it well worth the investment for any serious photographer.  This one was designed for us.