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You are here: Home / The Last Word / Nikon D810 read noise vs ISO setting

Nikon D810 read noise vs ISO setting

July 22, 2014 By JimK 4 Comments

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 result:

D810 RN vs ISO SS

The read-noise-limited dynamic range is a commendable 14 stops. The three ISO settings below ISO 64 are a shuck, as usual. You can see that there’s something funny going on between ISO 2000 and ISO 6400 that causes the noise to be lower than you’d think it should be.

Looking at it referred to the input of the variable-gain amplifier:

D810 RN vs ISO SS corr

The read noise actually rises from ISO 5000 to ISO 6400, which is passing strange.

 

← Nikon D810 dark field histograms Nikon D810 read noise vs shutter speed →

Comments

  1. Jack Hogan says

    July 23, 2014 at 5:32 am

    Hi Jim, a couple of questions:

    1) Given the histograms in yesterday’s post it would seem that normalization should refer to a full scale of 16383-600, right?
    2) Do you also take readings off two black fields and subtract them to eliminate potential non uniformities and pattern noise?
    3) Are these results in the ballpark of those obtained from the optical black pixels?

    Jack

    Reply
    • Jim says

      July 23, 2014 at 8:50 am

      1) You’re probably right, but it’s a tiny difference. I think I’ll leave it as is. Good catch, though.
      2) No.
      3) Haven’t looked at that.

      Thanks,

      Jim

      Reply
  2. Torbjörn Tapani says

    October 18, 2014 at 8:10 am

    Is that dip at 3200 noise reduction being applied? I remember something like that being said about the D800.

    Reply

Trackbacks

  1. Nikon D810 summary says:
    July 29, 2017 at 8:16 am

    […] From a noise perspective, the sensor in the D810 is a modest step up from the D800E’s if you operate at base ISO. There are some games being played at the higher ISOs that show more sophistication than the D800E&#8…. […]

    Reply

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