Canon EOS 5D Mark III Digital Camera Review

Dynamic Range

As you might expect, the huge sensor on the 5D Mark III preserves a large range of tonal values, with low dark current noise. This leads to a large dynamic range, letting the Mark III handle scenes with wildly varying brightness with ease. We found that the camera was able to preserve most of this dynamic range through ISO 800, mostly keeping 8 stops of clean range (clean being patches on a stepchart with a a measured signal to noise ratio above a high threshold) through that point. After that point, noise begins to overpower the image, with dynamic range falling off significantly after that through the rest of the ISO range. More on how we test dynamic range.

The Canon 5D Mark III shows some small improvements over the 5D Mark II, with about a 3/4th stop improvement through ISO 800. Beyond that the two cameras both fall off, but the low ISO improvements show Canon has tweaked their sensor design to better eliminate dark current noise in areas where not much light is hitting the sensor.