the last word

Photography meets digital computer technology. Photography wins -- most of the time.

  • site home
  • blog home
  • galleries
  • contact
  • underwater
  • the bleeding edge
You are here: Home / The Last Word / Noise vs resolution — part 7

Noise vs resolution — part 7

January 28, 2012 JimK Leave a Comment

In this post, I extend the testing done at ISO 3200 to 6400 and 12800. Same deal as in the previous posts, but I’ve dropped the NEX-5. Cameras: Sony NEX-7 and Nikon D3s. The Nikon was set to DX mode, giving it the same sensor size as the 24 megapixel Sony, but with only a little over 5 million big pixels. Same lens on both cameras: the Nikkor 35mm f/2 D (by the way, this is one sharp lens; I did a comparison with the Sony/Zeiss 24mm, and it was substantially crisper at f/5.6 for subjects a few feet away). Same aperture: f/5.6.

Here’s the overall image from the NEX-7 at ISO 6400:

All images were processed in Lightroom 3.6 to remove most visible noise, with the Nikon image settings limited by a desire to retain the greatest amount of image detail consistent with low noise. The Sony images were resized down to 2784×1848 using Perfect Resize with the default settings. What is presented here are crops 360 pixels wide, magnified 2x using nearest neighbor.

The NEX-7 image at 6400:

The D3s image at 6400:

The NEX-7 image at 12800 (note that there are a couple of cyan spots I couldn’t get rid of even with LR’s color noise control far enough to the right that the colors began to suffer):

The D3s image at 12800:

The improvement in quality of the NEX-7 over the D3s images is not as striking as it was in the ISO 3200 comparisons. On the other hand, the Sony images look better to me, and no one would say they are  worse, which is quite an achievement against a low-light champion like the D3s.

Next: the gloves come off, and we compare NEX-7 photographs to full frame images from the D3s.

The Last Word

← Noise vs resolution — part 6 Noise vs resolution — part 8 →

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

January 2023
S M T W T F S
1234567
891011121314
15161718192021
22232425262728
293031  
« Dec    

Articles

  • About
    • Patents and papers about color
    • Who am I?
  • Good 35-70 MF lens
  • How to…
    • Backing up photographic images
    • How to change email providers
  • Lens screening testing
    • Equipment and Software
    • Examples
      • Bad and OK 200-600 at 600
      • Excellent 180-400 zoom
      • Fair 14-30mm zoom
      • Good 100-200 mm MF zoom
      • Good 100-400 zoom
      • Good 100mm lens on P1 P45+
      • Good 120mm MF lens
      • Good 18mm FF lens
      • Good 24-105 mm FF lens
      • Good 24-70 FF zoom
      • Good 35 mm FF lens
      • Good 60 mm lens on IQ3-100
      • Good 63 mm MF lens
      • Good 65 mm FF lens
      • Good 85 mm FF lens
      • Good and bad 25mm FF lenses
      • Good zoom at 24 mm
      • Marginal 18mm lens
      • Marginal 35mm FF lens
      • Mildly problematic 55 mm FF lens
      • OK 16-35mm zoom
      • OK 60mm lens on P1 P45+
      • OK Sony 600mm f/4
      • Pretty good 16-35 FF zoom
      • Pretty good 90mm FF lens
      • Problematic 400 mm FF lens
      • Tilted 20 mm f/1.8 FF lens
      • Tilted 30 mm MF lens
      • Tilted 50 mm FF lens
      • Two 15mm FF lenses
    • Found a problem – now what?
    • Goals for this test
    • Minimum target distances
      • MFT
      • APS-C
      • Full frame
      • Small medium format
    • Printable Siemens Star targets
    • Target size on sensor
      • MFT
      • APS-C
      • Full frame
      • Small medium format
    • Test instructions — postproduction
    • Test instructions — reading the images
    • Test instructions – capture
    • Theory of the test
    • What’s wrong with conventional lens screening?
  • Previsualization heresy
  • Privacy Policy
  • Recommended photographic web sites
  • Using in-camera histograms for ETTR
    • Acknowledgments
    • Why ETTR?
    • Normal in-camera histograms
    • Image processing for in-camera histograms
    • Making the in-camera histogram closely represent the raw histogram
    • Shortcuts to UniWB
    • Preparing for monitor-based UniWB
    • A one-step UniWB procedure
    • The math behind the one-step method
    • Iteration using Newton’s Method

Category List

Recent Comments

  • JimK on Picking a macro lens
  • Glenn Whorrall on Picking a macro lens
  • JimK on What pitch do you need to scan 6×6 TMax 100?
  • Hatzipavlis Peter on What pitch do you need to scan 6×6 TMax 100?
  • JeyB on Internal focusing 100ish macro lenses
  • JimK on How focus-bracketing systems work
  • Garry George on How focus-bracketing systems work
  • Rhonald on Format size and image quality
  • JimK on Internal focusing 100ish macro lenses
  • Darrel Crilley on Fuji 100-200/5.6 on GFX, Nikon 70-200/@2.8E, Apo-Sonnar 135 on Z7, revisited

Archives

Copyright © 2023 · Daily Dish Pro On Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in

Unless otherwise noted, all images copyright Jim Kasson.