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You are here: Home / The Last Word / D810 live view’s effect on dark-field noise, longer exposures

D810 live view’s effect on dark-field noise, longer exposures

February 26, 2015 JimK 2 Comments

A few days ago, I posted some graphs that indicated that using live view on the D810 had no material effect on dark-field noise. Several people have expressed interest in seeing the test repeated at longer shutter speeds.

I’ll repeat the protocol. In a 68-degree F (20 degrees Celsius) room, I set a D810 up in manual mode, with 14 bit raw file precision. I set the ISO to 800, which is the highest ISO on the D810 where there is no clipping of dark-field images. I set the shutter to EFCS at 1/30 second, the aperture to f/16, the shutter mode to single shot, and the exposure delay to 0. With the lens cap on, I made a series of several exposures with live view off, and another series about a minute apart with live view on. I repeated the test with the shutter speed set to 1 second, with long exposure noise reduction off.

I analysed the files in RawDigger, both for almost the entire frame, and for a 200×200 central area, averaging the standard deviation of the captures for all four raw channels.

The 1/30 second results:

d810ISO800DFgraph30th

d810ISO800DFgraphsmall30th

Pretty much what we saw at 1/2000 second.

At one-second:

d810ISO800DFgraph1sec

d810ISO800DFgraphsmall1swc

Well, that’s interesting. The effect is actually less at one second. That’s because the D810 has some non-defeatable long-exposure processing.

 

 

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Comments

  1. Jeffrey Goggin says

    February 26, 2015 at 7:57 am

    How about yet another round of testing, this time using much longer exposures still?

    I’m primarily a nighttime photographer and my exposures typically range from 30 to 120 seconds, depending upon the subject and the format of camera I’m using (larger sensors = stopped down further = longer exposures.)

    I also live in central Arizona, so heat management is a very real issue with some of the cameras I use, including even those without a live view facility, such as my Phase One P30+ back (during the hot summer months, I often have to let it cool for several minutes between exposures to keep the noise level down.)

    I haven’t noticed any such issues with my Fuji X-Pro1, but I have a suspicion there might be a minor issue with heat-related noise with my Sony A7R, as I occasionally bracket my exposures and the last photo of the series sometimes appears to be ever-so-slightly noisier than the first photo.

    Although I do have an engineering background, I am afraid I have no way of testing this for myself. (If it will help any, I’ll be happy to send you files shot to your specs. Just let me know…)

    JG

    P.S.: Great site … keep up the good work!

    Reply
    • Jim says

      February 26, 2015 at 10:25 am

      I’ll post 30 second results tomorrow. If you can’t wait, look here:

      http://www.dpreview.com/forums/post/55369710

      Jim

      Reply

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