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Canon had an early lead in sensor noise (they bet big on CMOS early on when most of the market was treating CCD as the future), from the early 2000s up until S

Canon had an early lead in sensor noise (they bet big on CMOS early on when most of the market was treating CCD as the future), from the early 2000s up until Sony moved to on-chip ADC around 2009-2010 and Nikon adopted their sensors wholesale. It's worth noting that Canon has moved to on-chip ADC and that there's now only around a stop difference in noise between their sensors and Sony's, but from 2010-2016ish, Sony was certainly far ahead of the game.

giobox 8y ago
Exactly this. Canon had significant performance advantages in the mid 2000s thanks to their bet on CMOS technology when almost everyone else believed CCD had superior image quality. This really showed in the clean high ISO performance one got in their DSLRs vs the competition at that time, and it took a long while for competition to really catch up. This reminds me when the first “affordable” DSLRs from canon and Nikon arrived - both 6 megapixel models (the Canon 300D/Digital Rebel and the Nikon D70). The D70 was the better camera in a great many ways, but many buyers still chose the 300D to get access to the incredibly good for the time low noise CMOS sensor. I can’t count the number of discussions I had with friends looking to get a first DSLR debating the relative merits of those two landmark cameras. A later firmware hack for the 300D that gave it almost all the features of the more expensive 10D made this debate very interesting as well. The past 5 years are less impressive though, for sure, with the great sensor hardware from Sony etc.