Today I repeated the whole series of noise-vs ISO setting tests for the Leica M9. First, a check for self-heating with a series of repeated 1/4 second exposures of blackness at maximum ISO. Here’s the average value of the noise floor over the series: And here’s the standard deviation (the noise of the noise) over… [Read More]

I went through yesterday’s D4 testing, this time with the D800E. First, a check to make sure there are no serious self-heating problems. Exposure was 1/4 second at ISO 6400 at one frame per second. Subject was the back of the lens cap: And the standard deviation (noise of the noise floor) looked like this:… [Read More]

I really wanted to stop and go practice my guitar playing, but I just can’t leave this alone. I got a variable neutral density filter so I could do a SNR vs ISO series at 1/30 of a second, only with the green count around 500, which is Zone III with a 14-bit ADC. Same… [Read More]

With the self-heating tests out of the way, I could start to see the way that the noise floor varied with ISO setting in the D4. I set the shutter to 1/30 and made 16 exposures at ISO settings of 100 through 6400, selected 90% of the image area, and averages the statistics from each… [Read More]

I’ve spent a lot of time on signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) studies at mid and higher tones (Zones V through VII). Now it’s time to look at SNRs in the darker areas of the picture. Things get a bit more complicated as things get dimmer. At high photon counts, we can safely say that the mean… [Read More]