Canon EOS 5DS R review

ISO sensitivity and Noise

At low ISOs, the EOS 5DS R delivers exceptional levels of detail with essentially no visible noise. It’s only at ISO 800 that some noise starts to creep in when looking at the image on the pixel level, but you’d have to make huge prints for it to be visible. Noise only really starts to have any sort of negative impact at ISO 3200, mainly causing a slight deterioration of shadow detail. But with a fine granular pattern it’s not hugely problematic, and easily dealt with in post processing, although at the usual expense of fine detail and colour saturation. Crucially, there’s little unsightly low frequency chroma noise, which tends to be difficult to remove. The top two ISO settings are both perfectly usable, suggesting Canon could have offered a wider sensitivity range from this sensor.

ISO noise – JPEG

Below are 100% crops from JPEG files at a full set of ISO settings, shot using the EF 100mm f/2.8 Macro USM at f/13.

 ISO Noise – Raw

Below are the same crops, but now taken from the corresponding raw files converted using Adobe Camera Raw with noise reduction turned off. The idea here is to give an impression of the underlying noise on the files; normally you’d use noise reduction to minimise its appearance. Again we see very clean images at ISO 50, with some noise starting to become clearly visible around ISO 800, but only having a clearly negative effect at the top two settings.

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