I repeated the tests of the previous post over a higher ISO range. Here are the results: And the tight crops: You could criticize the noise in the ISO 400 image if you were feeling picky, but again, this is virtually ISO-less performance.

Graphs are fine as far as they go, and, for some purposes, they’re better than pictures, since they avoid confirmation bias. But they’re not the be all and end all. In fact, in photography it’s better tho think of the graphs as supporting the conclusions reached from the images, rather than the other way ’round…. [Read More]

Measuring read noise is useful, but by the time the image is so dark that you can see the read noise, the photon noise is usually pretty bad. For me, the photon noise is usually more important as a measure of practical image quality. I did a variant of my usual test that shows the combined… [Read More]

Like most cameras I’ve used, the D810 has an option to have the camera do processing to remove noise a for long exposures. Like most people I know, I leave if off most of the time. I made a series of dark-field exposures with and without the long-exposure noise reduction: Not what I expected. First… [Read More]

I brought the dark-field exposures of the previous post — plus a few more so that I has an exposure every 1/3 stop — into RawDigger, selected the central 90% of the frame, and measured the standard deviation of the read noise. I normalized the results to a full scale count of 16383, and here’s the… [Read More]