Daily Archives: March 29, 2012

 

I am starting to feel like and idiot, for days now I’ve been running tests that have not turned out how I expected them to turn out!  I was not sure that 36 mega pixels was going to be as impressive as it has turned out to be!  I was sure sure that packing 36 million pixels on a 35mm size FX sensor was not going to work so well in the noise department.  I selected an airplane hanging from the ceiling in our work area in the Nikon sponsored Sun n’ Fun Media Center, and carefully shot identical shots of the plane at ISO’s 100 – 200 – 400 – 800 – 1600 – 3200 – 6400 and 128,000.  The image above is at ISO 1oo directly below are examples of a cropped section of the original files at each ISO.  You may notice that I jump from ISO 100 the first shot, to ISO 800!  What happened to ISO 200 & 400?  No need to show them, they are identical in every way to the ISO 100 shot, yes no noise change of any consequence until 800 and even then I think the noise is only very slightly greater!

 

ISO 100 Crop

ISO 800 Crop

 

ISO 1600 Crop

 

ISO 3200 Crop

 

ISO 6400 Crop

 

The D800 goes to High 1 which is 128,000, but it was noisy enough to not bother showing it, however I think the D800 is spectacular out to 3200, and very usable at 6400.  My personal stsandard for noise is any ISO that will not require noise reduction later is usable for me.  Any ISO that does require noise reductions software, in the past, meant some significant sharpness would be lost in the process of processing the noise.  Not true with the D800!   The D800 files are so incredibly sharp to start with, a small loss of sharpness is almost not noticeable!  So I have to run over to the restaurant for another slice of humble pie!

 

I shot some more examples this morning and the ability to blow up these files is nothing short of amazing!  Enjoy!

 

 

 

And now another tight crop this time image one is full frame, image two is a 100% view!!!!