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Camera review
ISO performance
quality. For all but the OM-D E-M1, noise starts to impact on detail from ISO 800, but in all cases the grain at this level was minimal and there was just a slight reduction in contrast and detail. It’s a similar story at ISO 1600, which is perfectly usable in all cases, but probably the last level you can use without thinking more carefully about the impact. At all but ISO 25,600, where all four are as bad as each other, the OM-D E-M1 has an advantage. This isn’t huge, and in fact it’s less to do with the amount of noise in the images, and more about the sharper and more detailed images it starts with. Where the others lose detail as noise increases, the E-M1’s images hold up better because they have slightly more detail to start with.
ISO performance was assessed by shooting a variety of scenes at all ISO levels for each camera, including the dimly lit daylit scene shown. With all four cameras tested, the same focal length was used throughout, and the cameras were mounted on tripods, triggered with the self-timer. ISO sensitivity was progressively increased, with exposure controlled in aperture-priority mode. All noise reduction was turned off as far as possible in- camera, and the Raw images were converted in Lightroom 5 with no noise reduction applied. All four cameras put in a very similar performance when it came to noise levels. ISO 100 to 400 was just about perfectly clean, certainly with no noticeable impact on image
OLYMPUS OM-D E-M1
OLYMPUS OM-D E-M10
PANASONIC GH4
PANASONIC GX7
ISO 200
ISO 200
ISO 200
ISO 200
ISO 800
ISO 800
ISO 800
ISO 800
ISO 1600
ISO 1600
ISO 1600
ISO 1600
ISO 3200
ISO 3200
ISO 3200
ISO 3200
ISO 6400
ISO 6400
ISO 6400
ISO 6400
ISO 12,800
ISO 12,800
ISO 12,800
ISO 12,800
ISO 25,600
ISO 25,600
ISO 25,600
ISO 25,600
Photography News | Issue 12
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