Photography News 10

Camera review

ISO performance

CANON E0S M

FUJIFILMX-M1

With the Canon EOS M and the two Samsungs, noise started to show itself significantly from ISO 800 upwards, although with close scrutiny there was a small amount of grain at ISO 400 in images from the Canon. Noise in the Canon has an increasing impact at higher levels, interfering with detail and becoming really quite significant at ISO 3200 and above. The Samsungs hold out slightly better – ISO 1600 sees plenty of grain and loss of detail, but ISO 3200 isn’t much worse. There’s quite a sudden degradation in quality at ISO 6400. You might expect its full-frame sensor to give the Sony A7 a big advantage here, but that wasn’t really the case in our tests. It did have a slight benefit over the Canon and Samsungs, in that the impact of noise on image quality was slightly lower up to about ISO 3200, although the advantage wasn’t huge and there was no benefit in terms of when noise first became noticeable – ISO 800 was where it first had an effect. By far and away the best performers in our CSC group when it came to high ISO were the two Fujifilms, and the X-T1 in particular. With the X-M1, the impact of noise was minimal even at ISO 1600. At the top two native settings of ISO 3200 and 6400, noise was more of an issue, and caused some loss of detail, but still impressively little and even these levels are very usable. The X-T1 was even better, and kept noise at bay almost entirely up until ISO 3200 – even at

ISO 1600

ISO 3200

this level, quality is still very good. Even the highest native setting of ISO 6400 is still very usable. In both Fujifilms, extended ISO settings above 6400 are only available with JPEG files, not Raw. This is a shame, because noise reduction can’t be entirely turned off, and grain is smoothed at the expense of detail. This leaves images looking like Impressionist oil paintings, which is a shame, because based on the performance up to this level, Raw files may well have been usable. Still, an impressive performance by both Fujifilm models, and in particular the X-T1.

ISO 6400

ISO 12,800

SAMSUNG NX30

SAMSUNG NX300

FUJIFILMX-T1

SONYA7

ISO 1600

ISO 3200

ISO 6400

ISO 12,800

Photography News | Issue 10