the last word

At ISO 100, there’s a big surprise; the 14th bit is AWOL: At ISO 200, pretty musc the same thing with a bit more noise. The odd dip to the left of the mean of both green channels is curious: More of same at ISO 400: At ISO 800, the red channel is clipping: At… [Read More]

At ISO 100, the D800E shows all codes in use except for the red and blue channel WB digital gain dropouts: At ISO 200 there are no surprises: At ISO 400, just some more noise. You can see that the blue channel has more digital gain applied to it than the red channel: At ISO… [Read More]

Rather than use dark noise as a stimulus as in the preceding post, I have made a series of measurements of the histograms of the Nikon D4 and D800E, and the Sony RX-1 and NEX-7 when presented with a featureless surface eight or nine stops below clipping. I did not include the Leica M9 because… [Read More]

I started a thread on Luminous Landscape about computing unity gain ISO from a single exposure, and it’s gotten pretty interesting. There have been useful discussions about what good knowing the Unity Gain ISO is in picture-making. One of the discussion led me to make some test images and look closely at their histograms. In… [Read More]