I have exciting news. At least, it’s exciting to me. Your reaction may be, “Kasson, you really need to get out more.” Anyway, after many unsuccessful attempts, detailed in the previous posts, to tame the NEX-7 high-ISO noise by reducing the resolution of the image, I finally found something that works.
Here’s the recipe. Go into Lightroom or your favorite raw converter (I’ve only used Lightroom, but the technique should work in any other raw converter) and open up the noise controls. Get rid of all, or almost all, the visable noise. Be aggressive. Let the detail suffer a bit. Then resize the image downwards. I used Perfect Resize with the default control settings.
Using this approach, I resized NEX-5 and -7 images made at ISO 3200 from their original sizes to the 2784 x 1848 DX resolution of the reference Nikon D3s, and got lower noise and better details!
The crop of the NEX-7 image looks like this:
The crop of the NEX-5 image looks like this:
The crop of the reference D3s image. very lightly touched up with Lightroom noise reduction, because it’s so clean to begin with:
Now this… this is very interesting for me. Thank you for lighting up a worry I have had for a bit. I am selling up my 5D2 gear in favor of NEX’s because of the size and shooting style. You have defitively explored the nex 7 in depth and I thank you for the efforts in exploring and publishing your results. I can now happily get rid of all my canon gear.