Since EOS R5/R6 are going to be announced today it seems to be the right time to recap 1DXIII’s sensor performance. Actually it looks like R6 is sharing the same sensor as 1DXIII.
The sensor performs very differently depending on the shutter type (mechanical or electronic). Here are the PDR (Photography Dynamic Range) results from P2P (Photonstophoto):
- 1DXIII + MS: 11.25EV
- 1DXIII + ES: 10.03EV
- A9II + ES: 10.9EV
- A7III + MS: 11.6EV
PDR tends to close the gap between EDR so basically the EDR drop will only be worse than 1.22EV. Unfortunately P2P didn’t provide the EDR results and I don’t care enough to try to find out. The ADC resolution also drops to 12bit in the ES mode. So this is just like Sony’s chicken blood mode, sacrificing image quality for higher speed. The EDR drop seems to be higher than Sony’s sensor. For example A7RIV looses about 1EV EDR in the boost mode.
So how fast it is? In the MS mode it can’t be tested. In the ES mode it’s 60FPS, which is very impressive. The total bandwidth is 1.2G pixels at 12bit, quite similar to Sony’s latest 8 lane SLVS-EC sensors.
It looks like the dynamic range is still a bit on the low side in the ES mode compared to A9II, but the difference is not really meaningful now. We can say that 1DXIII’s sensor is just as competitive as A7RII, A7RIII, A7RIV, maybe even slightly better than A7III. But Canon has clearly exploited more of the sensor’s performance, giving us 4K60P and now even 4K120P, unlike Sony the cheap bastard.
Sony needs to wake up now if they don’t want the meme to come true.
PS: All my lenses that I’m actually using are from Tamron/Sigma. Imagine when they extend their product lines to RF mount.
Photo Engineering 