Canon 20D and ISO 3200

i have been pretty reluctant to shoot in ISO 1600 ever. on my D30, shooting at anything over ISO 400 was already getting pretty noisy, especially in low light conditions. ISO 800? you were hurting.

on my 10D, i felt that i could take pictures at ISO 800 without compromising image quality too much. ISO 1600 had too much noise in low light and i avoided it like the plague. as for the custom function-enabled ISO 1600? forget about it!

so imagine my shock when i shot a volleyball game a couple of weeks ago at ISO 1600. i figured that the new DiGiC II chip should really clean up the images enough that i should get decent results at ISO 1600. what i found instead was a beautiful image with little noise compared to my previous cameras.

this week i was a little more adventurous and i shot at ISO 3200. i figured that i could run the images through some of the better noise reduction filters i have and the results would be acceptable.

what i found instead shocked me.

mike hitting the ball

sure, there’s some detectable banding in the raw JPG, but with a little smoothing out, the image is more than just usable. i won’t hesitate shooting in high ISO anymore. virtually all of photos shot at citybeach this night were shot in ISO 3200.

i think this really opens up a whole new world of possibilities for me. we’ll see what happens from here on out.

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