Canon EOS 5D Mark II vs 5D Mark III high iso comparison

I want to share a small comparison I did between the old and new Canon siblings.
I'll show captures taken at night, with tungsten light, at iso 6400 and 12800. Raw files imported in lightroom 4.1, all default settings except the color profile set to Camera Standard.
The first thing you notice is the white balance: the MkIII does a better job to the eye, keeping the colors more natural with less yellow/orange cast:

The second thing you notice, is the different exposure time. I set both camera to 0 EV compensation, same iso and f5.6, and the 5DIII opted for 1/3 stop brighter exposure. You can see the difference in the histogram, the picture has actually more info in the mid-high range of EV. The same happened with the iso 12800 shots.

Now the noise:

As you can see, not much difference at iso 6400, with luminance NR set to 0 and color NR to 25. You can notice something in the shadows, where the MkIII has some edge.
Then at iso 12800:

Here the difference is more noticeable. One thing to consider is that the Mark II's iso 12800 is an "iso expansion" (since its maximum native iso value is 6400), whereas the 5DIII maximum native is 25600. This means that the Mark II has shot at iso 6400, halving the exposure time and artificially overexposed by 1 stop after the shot.

Canon claimed "2 stops noise improvement" for the Mk III over the Mk II, and this is more or less valid for out-of-camera jpegs:

WIth in-camera NR set to Standard for both, you can see how the Mk III does a better job with cleaning up the noise, retaining a good amount of detail at a slight loss of sharpness compared to Mk II. One thing to notice is how the jpg's white balance is more accurate for both cameras, compared to raw files converted with "as shot" WB setting in lightroom.

The best result is achieved when converting the raw file and applying the NR with lightroom. Here is a comparison between in camera jpg and converted raw: both files iso 12800 shot with Mark III:

Here on the raw file I applied Luminance NR 70, adjusted the WB and added a tad of sharpness.
That's all folks! 
Duca V2