Canon China has released official information about the increased ISO capabilities coming in a future firmware update for the Canon EOS R7. This update will give the EOS R7 the capabilities of shooting at ISO 204800 by using pixel shift.
From Canon China
…. through the ISO expansion firmware upgrade, the ISO 204800 sensitivity enables the EOS R7 to have stronger shooting capabilities in extremely low light conditions, and can capture more details, bringing more cost-effective solutions to data recording and monitoring, industrial inspection, medical imaging and other fields.
A strange report from DCW surfaced describing an announcement at the China International Public Security Products Expo, Canon announced a new feature for the R7, dubbed as per DCW’s image as ISO+.
From what I can gather from the article it’s using pixel shift on the R7 to effectively reduce image noise and increase the effective ISO of the camera up to 204800 from 32000 (or 51,200 expanded).
Now pixel-shift reducing noise isn’t a new thing – and Canon could fairly easily rattle off a pixelshift composite, and shrink it back down to the native resolution, and voila – you have a much cleaner image.
Just in case you don’t know what pixel shift is, this is a handy descriptive diagram of the core basics.
As you “stack” those shifted images together, noise cancels out leaving a cleaner image.
But all the limitations of pixelshift would also apply here, so it’s most certainly a YMMV add-on – since you are taking 4+ images in a row, any movement will be seen in the image.
As far as I could tell (and Craig looked too because he likes proving me wrong – he keeps receipts when that happens), there’s no Canon announcement or notation anywhere as of the time of this article.
According to DCW, Canon is quoted as stating;
Through the ISO expansion firmware upgrade, the ISO204800 sensitivity enables the EOS R7 to have stronger shooting capabilities in extremely low light conditions, and can capture more details.
https://www.digitalcameraworld.com/news/this-aps-c-camera-just-got-full-frame-iso-performance
So basically hearsay about more hearsay?
The article gets a little disjointed as it starts to talk about the R5 (which this isn’t about), and as far as I know, Canon hasn’t added pixel shift to the R7 yet. If someone tells me I’m wrong, I’m here for it. Also, part of me thinks that a security expo in China wouldn’t be when Canon would release this new feature. But stranger things have happened before, and I live in anticipation of the strange.
So I suspect this entire thing is about pixel shift coming to the R7, and Canon has decided to make a high ISO setting to pixel shift. Or it’s nothing, and even though I checked the date on the article 5 times, April 1 came early. That being said, this wouldn’t surprise me, which is why we decided to get the article out now.
Source: DCW
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I will miss the cripple hammer, I built so many things with it.
As you mentioned, I’ve been successfully using the R6II in manual mode with auto ISO, shooting bracketed exposures at 40fps for real estate photography. For static subjects, I stack 3-5 exposures in Lightroom to create extremely clean DNG files with rich detail.
I understand that many people prefer to get nice, clean JPEGs straight out of the camera, so if that feature becomes available, I’m sure some users will appreciate it. It would be great to see Canon continue adding features like this to its cameras, especially since Fujifilm and Sony now appear to be offering firmware updates that risk causing issues over introducing new features. Let's just hope Canon doesn't also introduce unstable firmwares as well. Nikon has been doing very well adding features to its mirrorless cameras over the past few years.
it entirely depends on how they handle subject motion there could be benefits.
again, this could be a April 1 article that came out a 6 months early. I didn't really understand it much but could "see" if canon did something like this, and it's not backed up anywhere yet.
though i haven't had enough coffee to check around this morning.
Using IBIS to shift each frame one subpixel would, in theory, improve colour accuracy as well.
I can imagine this would improve static JPEG/HEIC images a lot, I’m not convinced it will beat RAW+Dxo/Topaz.
You can stack images in Lightroom? I can do that in PS, but how do you do that in LR?
You can also mix that stack with panoramas, which is a nice time saver. Not much control, but it works well enough for me to avoid using PS :)
It seems this technology only benefits those that print extremely large and anyone that does this professionally would just buy a higher resolution camera.
Panasonic had this nailed way back when they launched the S1R. Loved that camera. Even when taking photos of something moving, like a waterfall, it would figure things out. Saved as DNG files. Yes, it was useful for ISO stuff. There were situations where long exposure effects weren't desirable (like water smoothening). Sophisticated versions of this will identify portions of image that contain movement and choose the most appropriate single frame to fill it.
Canon's recent attempt at it got about 30 percent there, but I expect they'll get at least as good as Panasonic's tech eventually.
Sony's version never matured into anything useful. About 3/4 of the time, the images fail to merge, and you couldn't even do it in the field. Had to use their - gulp - proprietary imaging software. That said, I haven't shot Sony in a few years. May have improved since.
The upshot: the tech can be pretty useful for many situations. Can be used for either increasing effective resolution, or for decreasing effective ISO. It's essentially a form of stacking.
The UI is horrid, but it does work and is well worth the price*, for the desktop version.
*it’s free.