View single post by Gert
 Posted: Tue Jun 19th, 2012 14:36
Gert



Joined: Thu Apr 19th, 2012
Location: Vejle, Denmark
Posts: 48
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Eric wrote:
...

I confess I am still trying to understand why the D800 lost noise on sampling down?

I wouldn't say that it lost noise, it more like the noise is less evident - but i have just posted a iso 6400 crop from the full size file - tell me what you see?

My personal theory for why down-sampling would "reduce" the noise goes like this:

Noise is a random pattern and when downsampling from 36MP to 12MP it is like combining 3 pixels into one, now imagine one of the pixels has a wrong value and the other 2 is close to good, then we would see number 1 as noise, but when combing the 3 pixels the good values of the 2 pixels would even out the "bad" value on pixel one and the noise would thus be evident.

Another way of looking at it is, when down-sampling you will lose some fine detail (12MP cannot represent the same level of detail as 36MP), and if the noise is fine-grained enough then that will be some of the "details" you loose.