View single post by Gert

Posted: Tue Jun 19th, 2012 11:10

Joined:	Thu Apr 19th, 2012
Location:	Vejle, Denmark
Posts:	48
Status:	Offline

When most "review" sites does noise test they always shows the result at full resolution, which also makes sense if you want to see the quality of each pixel, but when you start comparing cameras with different resolution - I for one - fail to see the usefulness.

Because the final output will need different scaling; e.g. if you want to print at a specific size with a given DPI, then you will have to scale the picture resolution to meet that target, and with different camera resolutions the scaling is going to be different.

Up-sampling a file is going to make noise more evident, while downscaling could have the effect of "iron out" some of the noise, although it might not always be the case.

So I asked myself: what if 12MP is enough, how noisy is the D800?

And the result was a bit of a surprise (to me at lest), hence this post:

Camera A the old D3 and
Camera B the new D800, where Aftershot Pro rescaled to 12MP as the last step of the RAW->JPG conversion.

I have been at true believer that more pixels equals more noise, and at the full 36MP the D800 looks more noisy than the D3, but as the pictures shows when downscaling the D800 to 12MP it is the other way around.

/Gert