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You are here: Home / The Last Word / Low-signal histograms at various ISOs

Low-signal histograms at various ISOs

March 28, 2013 JimK Leave a Comment

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 I expect that it will perform pretty much like the D4, except with a lot more noise; if anyone would like to see that camera tested, let me know and I’ll oblige.

Each camera was measured with the camera ISO setting at all the whole stops from ISO 100 through ISO 6400. Shutter speeds were kept at 1/60 and faster to avoid any in-camera processing that might take place at slow shutter speeds. These tests have demonstrated to me that the histogram combing observed at high ISO settings in the previous post are due to two reasons:

  • ADCs that, although they are specified as 14-bit devices, are not delivering 14 bits of resolution
  • Digital gain applied by the camera manufacturers to the real raw data before it is written to the raw file.

The digital gain seems to be applied at very high ISOs, where there is so much noise that the l0ss in resolution of taking a  14-bit unsigned integer and multiplying it by a number less than 16 to yield another 14-bit unsigned integer probably does not adversely impact image quality.

One thing that surprised me is the Gaussian look to the noise in all cases. I had thought that the noise had longer tails than that from my dark noise tests.

I’ll be posting the results, one post per camera, immediately after this.

 

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