selmslie Loc: Fernandina Beach, FL, USA

If you are looking at a camera to capture less noise you might be looking at the wrong comparisons.

Instead of looking at plots of the cameras' dynamic ranges on DXOMARK or Photons to Pixels, consider the signal to noise ratio (SNR).

See the link in my next post for more information.

selmslie Loc: Fernandina Beach, FL, USA

selmslie Loc: Fernandina Beach, FL, USA

I just added another illustration at the end of the document with the results from an A7 III which has a more pronounced jump in black noise as the camera switches from the low ISO gain to the high ISO gain.

The exposure was the same while the ISO went from 100 to 51200. The dual gain sensor switched between ISO 500 and 640. Although this caused the signal (S) and the noise (N) to change between ISO 400 and 800, the actual ratio of signal to noise (S/N) remained constant. In other words, the noise did not change since the exposure was constant.

selmslie Loc: Fernandina Beach, FL, USA

And I also added information for the Z7, A7 II M (monochrome conversion) and the X100T.

Digital Image Noise

selmslie Loc: Fernandina Beach, FL, USA

Here is a comparison of the four cameras I have been studying.

Note that the Z7 is nearly double the resolution of the 24MP A7s so this is a comparison of their 100% view. To compare them for the same size print we could add about 1 stop to the SNR for the Z7.

On the other hand, the X100T is only 16MP and it's an APS-C camera so it's SNR may be overstated by about the same amount.