Ten years of APS-C
in Articoli il 02 Luglio 2014, 14:00


How much progress has there actually been in sensor technology in 10 years? I was curious to see how an old camera compares with the most recent APS-C cameras, so I have taken the dust off my old Canon 350D and I have compared it side by side with the Canon 70D. The Canon 350D was announced in 2005, but it uses the 20D's 8 megapixels, APS-C sensor, from 2004. The 70D currently (June 2014) is the most recent APS-C from Canon.

The comparison

Here you can see 100% crops for RAW files converted with Camera RAW; no noise reduction has been applied. Since noise can change a lot depending by the brightness of the scene, I have included both a crop from highlight areas and one from shadows.




At ISO 100, the 70D clearly has a lot more detail than the 350D; the advantage of 20 megapixels vs 8 can be clearly seen. The shadow noise is about the same if you look at 100% crops, but if you resize both images to the same resolution the 70D shows much cleaner shadows.





At ISO 1600, when looking at unresized photos, the 70D show obviously more detail, but surprisingly the noise is about the same. By resizing at the same resolution the noise of the 70D is reduced, so it gets about one stop better than the 350D.





At ISO 12800 the 70D is, agin, the winner both in terms of detail and noise, but the difference is not huge and frankly both images are unusable. Note that the 350D is limited at 1600 ISO, to get the 12800 ISO photo I have taken a photo at 1600 underexposed by three stops, then I have corrected the exposure by the same value (+ 3 stops) with camera RAW.

So, how much sensitivity have we gained in ten years of APS-C sensor development? Actually, not much: the most recent Canon APS-C sensor is about 1 stop better than a sensor from ten years ago, of course a welcome improvement, but less than what I expected. In the next crops you can see that the 70D at 1600 ISO is about on par with the 350D at 800 ISO; these are the maximum sensitivities that I consider fully usable on 70D and 350D.




Of course, sometimes I have got good results even at 3200 ISO with the 70D, but it requires a careful post processing. ISO 6400 is...


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