The noise has never bothered me in these things it has always been the banding.
EXACTLY
I'd have kept my 5d2 and 7d if it were not for the plaid/stripes.
FWIW, the 5d2 felt pretty crude in some ways anyway so I certainly don't miss it as much as the 7d.
I'm also interested in seeing whether the outer area of the 70d sensor that is NOT dual-sensel equipped will provide a slightly different noise pattern than the main area.
I can sometimes make out the crop area of my d800's sensor IF I do things just right and push it really hard from a dark frame shot; and that's not as much of a structural difference as dual vs single sensels.
I'll do a lens cap shot as soon as I can get my hands on a 70d. I'd like to see how much better it may be than my 60d in terms of FPN.
A lens cap shot would be good to see. I think that is the best way to see what is really lurking down there.
They must be doing something different in this sensor because all of the sudden they are able to read out 40MP at 7 FPS in this thing while the best they seemed to be able to do with the 5DIII was 22 MP at 6 FPS which is almost 2x the processing speed still using the so-called DiGiC 5+. Maybe in the process of doing that whey also cleaned up the FPN somewhat.
There has always been confusion on the forums and the threads with regard to the DxO measurements and some of the so-called “comparison tests” that people love to show. The DxO result is really showing random noise effects but the thing that shows up so strongly in the ad-hoc demos is really the pattern noise.
I find that the 5DIII is a significant improvement over the 5DII and supposedly the 6D is even better so perhaps they have finally figured out how to read out the sensor nicely.
It will make the threads a lot more fun for a while anyway ;-)
Well the 5D3 solved the pattern banding at low ISO in ONE direction but it still has oooodles of it the other direction so IMO it does no better in that regard than the 5D2, hatched or striped it still sticks out to the eye.
Now the 6D did do better more like back to the old 1D3/40D days.
It seems that the 70D MAY, still no full black frame so it's hard to be sure, also the test pre-production cameras have often had much better banding than release cameras, bit it seems it may have fixed the banding and clumping problems so that the low ISO shadow noise now has the nice character of Exmor more or less.
However, at least going by the masked area, the regular fine grained shadow noise is actually maybe a trace worse than the 7D if anything.
So on engineering DR it seems they have still made zero progress, most likely. But at least they may have finally fully solved the low ISO banding issues so you will at least be able, most likely, to get the most out of the shadow SNR that they do provide you with (although it seem still maybe 2+ stops behind Exmor for that). It may be all but entirely free of pattern banding and chroma and luma blobbing. But still quite noisy for the fine pattern noise. Anyway it might be a lot, lot nicer to deal with than most canon cameras other than the 1Ds3 and 6D and 1Dx and a decent deal nicer to deal with than those and like Exmor in that regard. But again the StdDev of the random black frame noise appeared to be very old school again.
The 5D3 did seem to improve high ISO banding of all types over the 5D2.