Archives for 2015

There has been a little speculation that the increase in noise observed in the ISO 100 long exposure noise reduction (LENR) images in yesterday’s post might be wholly or in part the result of the a7RII’s dropping into 12-bit precision when LENR is active. Fortunately, there’s a way to test that. Yesterday’s exposures were 30… [Read More]

Yesterday we saw that the Sony a7RII long exposure noise reduction (LENR, aka dark-frame subtraction) is applied at shutter speeds so short that it hurts the engineering dynamic range of the image. That experiment was performed at ISO 3200. It just didn’t seem right that the Sony engineers would do something like that. To be… [Read More]

We saw in the previous post that the long exposure noise reduction (LENR) option in the Sony a7RII reduced the precision from 13 to 12 bits. We have previously seen that some 12-bit modes bring spatial filtering to the a7RII. Is LENR one of them? Here’s the spectrum of a 1000×1000 sample from the center… [Read More]

I’ve had a couple of questions about the long exposure noise reduction (LENR, aka dark-frame subtraction) in the a7RII. I’ve had to do some research, since I never have used this function in any alpha 7 camera. It’s not that LENR is useless, just that its usefulness is limited, and that the kind of photography… [Read More]

The Sony alpha 7 R Mark II (a7RII) has a new autofocus system that combines contrast-detection and phase autofocus with about 400 (the mind reels — how do they cover these up in the raw files?) phase detection autofocus points. The new system has eye detection added to the old face detection, which I never… [Read More]