EOS 90D - Hands on review

AlanF

Desperately seeking birds
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Aug 16, 2012
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The 90D arrived a little late this afternoon so had time for just a few measurements. It is not very substantial and won't be useful for driving in tent pegs, but it is light. It does provide a good grip for holding telephoto lenses. The download cable is a micro USB and Canon is so mean that it doesn't include one in the box. FoCal isn't ready for for AFMA when tethered to the computer but it does do AFMA on downloaded jpegs. So, I calibrated it it with a 100-400mm II and a 400mm DO II and again with 1.4xTCs. The preliminary data on charts are good. It is outresolving the same lenses on a 5DSR and gives very nice jpegs OOC. More tomorrow.
 
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AlanF

Desperately seeking birds
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Aug 16, 2012
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It's a nuisance that DxO PL wont be ready for the 90D until November so I had to use Adobe PS with which I am not expert. So, I shot RAW + jpegs and initially compared camera-produced jpegs, which proved to be a unfortunate. The 100-400mm II appeared to gain no resolution when adding a 1.4xTC. I then discovered the lens correction in the camera was the problem and lowered resolution. Turning off the lens correction greatly improved the images. The clue was that the Sigma 150-600mm C that doesn't have lens correction gave much better images at 600mm than the 100-400mm II + 1.4xTC. The gap between the two was lowered on removing the lens correction but the 90D paired very well with the Sigma. The take home message is that the 90D gives acceptable images at 560mm f/8 and outresolves the 5DSR.

I tried tracking birds in flight. Spot AF worked very well but the 9 centre points focussed much more slowly.
 
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AlanF

Desperately seeking birds
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Aug 16, 2012
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People post close ups of birds to show how sharp a lens or a sensor is. Frankly, most of us can get stunning shots with any gear if we can get close enough, which is all part of field skills. What a good sensor can do is to extend what you can can do to more difficult situations. Yesterday, I hardly got close to anything but used it as an opportunity to test the 90D with a 100-400mm II and a Sigma 150-600mm C. The Sigma at 600mm at f/6.3 was not fazed by the sensor and was able to pull out distant detail. The two shots are not intended to be "keepers" but to show this. There was a grey heron the other side of a lake, a couple of hundred meters away, in the red circle in the image from my iPhone. The 90D at 600mm with an inexpensive lens got an image of it. (The 100-400mm II is so much easier to hand hold for me now.)

Hobson'sPark.jpegIMG_0630_Heron_Sigma_600mm.jpg
 
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Aussie shooter

https://brettguyphotography.picfair.com/
Dec 6, 2016
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brettguyphotography.picfair.com
People post close ups of birds to show how sharp a lens or a sensor is. Frankly, most of us can get stunning shots with any gear if we can get close enough, which is all part of field skills. What a good sensor can do is to extend what you can can do to more difficult situations. Yesterday, I hardly got close to anything but used it as an opportunity to test the 90D with a 100-400mm II and a Sigma 150-600mm C. The Sigma at 600mm at f/6.3 was not fazed by the sensor and was able to pull out distant detail. The two shots are not intended to be "keepers" but to show this. There was a grey heron the other side of a lake, a couple of hundred meters away, in the red circle in the image from my iPhone. The 90D at 600mm with an inexpensive lens got an image of it. (The 100-400mm II is so much easier to hand hold for me now.)

View attachment 186626View attachment 186627
That is quite phenomenal at that range.
 
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AlanF

Desperately seeking birds
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Aug 16, 2012
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I find this particularly interesting, as I am thinking of an M6 as a more portable toy. The performance of the 90D and lens in your heron shot is astoundingly good. Previously, one needed $20,000 of camera and lens to pull off that shot!
The Sigma pairs with it well. One good thing about the 90D vs M6 II is that it has a nice deep grip for handling the long lenses.
 
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AlanF

Desperately seeking birds
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Aug 16, 2012
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I hgave now done a series of comparisons using line separations on charts over various distances of my telephoto lenses on the 5DSR vs 90D (100-400mm II, 400mm DO II, ± 1.4xTC, Sigma 150-600mm C, 400/600mm. In theory, the 90D should have 29% more resolution if the only factor was pixel size. But, there is the matter of an AA-filter and also limiting effects of diffraction. In practice, I find that the 29% advantage is reduced by a factor of 2 and the effective extra resolution is about 15%.
 
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AlanF

Desperately seeking birds
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Aug 16, 2012
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I checked out the resolution of the 90D vs 5DIV (which has the same sensor as the EOS R). It should be 1.7x higher and it is about 1.5-1.6x. The bare 400mm DO II on the 90D has better contrast and better resolution than the lens + 1.4xTC on the 5DIV. The 400mm + 1.4xTC on the 90D is about 25-30% sharper than the lens + 2xTC on the 5DIV.
 
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Their comparison with the 7Dii says the 90D has higher noise at all higher ISO level's which is disappointing.
Are you sure? At 1:1 maybe but that isn't a fair comparison.

On a same sized comparison the 90D is showing a lot more detail than the 7D MkII in the 12,800 exposures even using the jpegs.
 
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