Canon 5D MkIII Dynamic Range

Last week someone was asking about the dynamic range of the camera that has become my mainstay, the Canon 5D MkIII. We had been discussing the advantages and disadvantages of going to a medium format camera. One of the selling points of medium format is a cleaner image with greater dynamic range.

This got me thinking about how wide a dynamic range the Canon has in a real world test. According to several websites the total range is about 12 stops at ISO 50. You can find lots of graphs and charts, but (me being a visual person) I wanted to see what that really meant. I didn’t want to spend huge amounts of time on it, so I came up with a simple test. I used three pieces of paper, one black, one white, and one thunder gray. You might ask, why thunder gray? Because I have tons of it around the studio. Nothing scientific here. 🙂

I then taped them to a piece of cardboard and clamped them to a boom. See below.

The next part was real easy. I just photographed the test strips and bracketed my aperture my full f/stops. I was shooting with Canon 50mm f/1.2. I also was shooting at an ISO of 160. Below is compilation of the images. It appears (on a calibrated monitor) that the overall dynamic range was greater than the range of the lens. So that makes it more than stops.

I guess the conclusion I draw from this is that the Canon 5D MkIII has a useful dynamic range of more that 5 stops. You can differential all three test strips (black, white, and gray) from f/3.5 to f/16 in this example. That’s pretty impressive.

Again, I realize this is far from a scientific analysis, but it shows how good the sensor is in resolving darkness and light. Below is photo taken the other morning down a hallway of my house. I think it helps illustrate how well the camera does it’s job.

That’s it for now. Thanks for reading and be sure to check out other parts of my website such as my personal projects page – Personal Projects.