Nighttime Sports with Canon EOS 80D

My last remaining Canon EOS 7D body, although it has (comparatively) a low shutter count, is now a seven year old camera model and in many respects technology has moved on. This, combined with the autofocus issues I've been having with it and my 70-200 f/2.8 zoom, prompted me to semi retire the 7D - again.

I wanted to see how Canon's newest APS-C body, the 80D, handled the high ISO and low light autofocusing issues that sports under the lights brings. I was very happy with the noise at ISO 4000 with this camera and the autofocus performance was better than with my 5D Mark III.

I used manual mode and f/2.8, 1/750th of a second and ISO 4000 for the entire evening. When I last shot on this same field, I used f/2.8, 1/1000th of a second and ISO 6400 with my 5DIII. I ended up having to darken many of those images.

Some downsides of the 80D are it takes the camera a while to write the 24MP files to the SD card after a burst so you might have to wait to review images. I usually use Canon's DPP version 3 software because I'm used to it but I have to use DPP version 4 as version 3 won't process 80D RAW files. And on my 2010 MacBook Pro it's slow. Very slow.

Here are some shots from the game followed with a 100% crop to show the noise level. Processing was with default settings. As always, if you click on an image and then click on it again you will see the photo at the resolution I uploaded.