7D vs G9 at ISO 1600

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I’m laughing at myself for misconceptions and memories of the quality of my G9.

Since getting the 7D, I’ve been randomly playing with it and marveling at its capabilities. Although I have other lenses, all my shots so far have been with the (cheap) 50mm fixed lens. I thought this was supposed to be a good lens and would give me a large aperture 80mm equivalent for portrait work. One of my first shots was this one (taken out the door, down the hall and cropped to hide the junk on my desk) at f2.8 and ISO 1600.

I didn’t do anything special to get this picture – just set ISO 1600, f2.8 and fired off a Av mode in-camera JPEG. The small rectangle AF focus point was placed on the center of the bookshelf. This is a 100% crop so we are pixel peeking here. All done rather simply and quickly. No matter how I rationalized, this is not a good result. In fact, my G9 would do better.

Or would it? The G9 was handy so I set it for ISO 1600, zoomed in a bit to get roughly the 50mm equilvalent focal length and fired off another shot. The G9 shot was also at f2.8. Here’s a similar 100% crop.

Hmm, perhaps that 7D does take a better ISO 1600 shot after all!


I’ve been tweaking the focus adjustment for that 50mm lens but have concluded that it is just very soft at f2.8. Fortunately, it improves rapidly as the aperture is stopped down. This is a little frustrating to me but, after all, it is a cheap lens.

The 7D was easy to set up and use for basic photography but I have a lot to learn about it.


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