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reddogmotrsprts reddogmotrsprts is offline
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Join Date: Mar 2011
Location: Outside Philly
Posts: 606
If you truly need great low-light performance -- maybe you're a video guy? -- you might want to rethink upgrading to 50MP. You'll have smaller pixel sites, which means more in-camera software-induced signal-processing noise and more loss of light due to interstitial gaps between photosites.

For my favorite description of the issues at play, take a look at this article on pixel sizes and resolution, and this comparison between your 5D and the A7r/A7s, normalized for output resolution.

You should find that your 22MP 5D already outperforms the 36MP A7r in very low light, despite having a third less resolution.

That said, the heuristics for noise reduction in typical post-processing software like Aperture or Lightroom are much more sophisticated than the simple downscaling used in the comparison above.

Basically, there is more to evaluating low-light performance than looking at the ISO number, just as there is more to evaluating resolution than looking at the mega-pixels number. I probably shouldn't have generalized quite so much in my previous comment.

Disclaimer: I'm a D700 and D800E shooter.
Old 02-07-2015, 11:33 AM
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