Disclaimer: I’m often first in line to do some Canon-bashing.
That being said , the recent cameras have sensors that perform very well compared to the competition, and they don’t deserve to be laughed anymore .
The previous canon era , they were HORRIBLE for shadow boosting . The whole ettr movement came from their cameras , while it’s a bad idea in general.
The sensors in Canons started to be ‘closer’ to the competition from around the 5d mark 4 (and I believe 1dx in front of it ). That means that basically everything from the 1000/2000d line , the whole hundreds line (up to the 850d i think) and all the known classics (like the 7d , 5d mark 2 and mark 3, etc…) are NOTORIOUS for their shadow noise , at every ISO , even base iso.
That makes boosting the shadows an affair several steps behind their peers for all those years. They kept using an analog preamp circuit before converting the signal to digital , which added noise.
The 6d mark2 is one of the more modern canons , which still use the old sensor design , and also have this issue.
A lot of the eos-m line is actually quite ok, and basically everything from the eos-r line is fine or even more than fine.
Now, there are more aspects what make a camera good besides shadow boosting. And Canon did a lot right. But sensor noise, they didn’t .
Also, modern cameras can often take a 4ev exposure boost in post without any noise disadvantage. But you got to remember , this is for base iso! Or at least the lower ISOs .
If i take a shot at iso 1600, then take one with every parameter the same except iso 100. I can safely boost that iso100 shot to the same brightness as the iso1600 one, without increasing (sensor) noise. And that means you capture more highlight detail , because your shot-exposure was lower.
But, don’t go expecting to take a iso1600 shot, and boost it by 4ev or 5ev and have the same clean effect ! That iso1600 shot already contains sensor noise which you’ll boost more. Or the camera already did the 'shoot at lower iso and boost in software '-trick automatically .
Modern cameras with dual native ISOs are interesting , because sticking to one of the two base ISOs gives you good results. If you have a camera with a base iso 100 and a dual one at iso2500, shooting at iso 2500 might give you cleaner results than shooting iso 1600 :).
Also, this whole talk is about sensor noise . There are more kinds of noise in a (digital) camera. Light photon 'shot noise ’ being one of them , and the sensor tech won’t do anything about that.
Which in a nutshell means , that the faster your shutterspeed , the more noise the image will have , however good your sensor is or whatever the other settings were .
Technically , Canons shadow noise started to become better when they integrated the preamp into the sensor , like other designs have been doing for some time while Canon still wasn’t.
As a general crude rule of thumb : the canon SLRs have the old design , the mirrorless cameras have the newer design. This isn’t entirely true as explained before (there are some eos-d cameras with an integrated preamp like to 5d Mk4 , and there are some eos-m cameras with an older sensor i believe ).
If you are in a region where Canon names their cameras ‘rebel’ or something like that , you have to look up the names because i only know the ‘normal’ names.
Will definitely look more into the data!
But its either way very helpful to plan my trajectory for the next years.
But I don’t have anything current/recent so…
Would not be possible with my 80D. I think it was taken with a X-T3, which also has just a crop sensor.
