Page created April 19, 2012 

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Update History

012/04/23 - "House Plants" at ISO 8000.

2012/04/22 - "Book Cover" test image at ISO 8000.

2012/04/20 - "Bookshelf" test image at ISO 6400, with and without NR and some crops (following the cascade image)

This page will be regularly updated as more experience is obtained.

Sample images are at the bottom of this page.

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High ISO

There's very little noise at any ISO up to and including ISO 6400. Of course, you can always find some noise at any ISO if you want to get ridiculous about it and view at 200% or whatever but I'm interested only in the sort of noise that might prove distracting in a real-world image at presentation size. When noise does finally become prominent enough in D800 images that you might want to do some filtering it is of the sort that can be dealt with while insignificantly compromising detail - at least at ISO 8000 which is as fast as I have tried so far. Even then, unless printing very large indeed, noise is fine and smooth enough you might be able to ignore it. It will be interesting to see some proper lab tests.

House Plants - 20% Crop

F/7.1, ISO 8000: No NR. Dim room lighting. At this scale a lot of magnification but noise very subdued. Doubt I would filter this image prior to making a print this size or a very large print from the full frame.

Book Cover - 50% crop

F/9, ISO 8000: Dim room lighting. No re-touching, no NR. Patterns like this will conceal some noise but it is obvious there is no large scale noise such as blotches which are almost impossible to deal with in processing.

Book Cover - crop from previous image.

Dim room lighting. No re-touching, no NR. I can see a small amount of chroma noise. 

Book - Background

Crop taken from beside the book where there are untextured tones. At this scale the full image would be greater than 100%. Noise now clearly visible but it is "high quality noise" ... very fine and uniform. You might not want to deal with it at all but it is, in any event, rather easily filtered.

Cascade - ISO 6400 ... no noise processing

80% crop in horizontal dimension

Approximate 15% crop - ISO 6400

Note low noise level in shadow areas.

The following suite of bookshelf images is to explore noise levels at ISO 6400 more thoroughly. For pixels of this size the calculated diffraction limit is F/9 so at F/7.1 the full resolution of the sensor is just barely exploited. The lighting is rather flat, coming from a fluorescent desk lamp directed toward the ceiling.

Test Image - From NEF - no processing -

[ISO 6400, F/7.1, hand held at 1/20 s (applies to all following images/crops)]

Micro Nikkor 105 mm VR

Original Image - Full Frame: unaltered in any way

Deep Shadow - no NR

Inside upper corner of the book shelf is barely resolved. RGB numeric values in original at about 10.

Shadow Area (from upper right in preceding crop)

This is at about 600%. Brightness and contrast set to extreme values in order to expose noise. 

Mid-range values - No NR

Full Frame - NR applied

Mid-range crop - from above (NR)

Nikon D800 review