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Noise Comparison A610, A630 and S3IS

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Offline A630Lover

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Noise Comparison A610, A630 and S3IS
« on: 05 / April / 2009, 15:57:46 »
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Offline A630Lover

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Re: Noise Comparison A610, A630 and S3IS
« Reply #1 on: 05 / April / 2009, 16:03:58 »
What you can see from the first three shots is that the A610 is applying the more sharpening...but he can! Because you can already notice that it has the least noise. The A630 output is not bad, but there is not much more detail in it...well, where is the 3Mpix advantage? ::) The S3 output looks soft in comparison with the other two.

For the first ISO series, I also post a corner crop, to see the differences in optical quality. All shots where taken wide open.
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Offline A630Lover

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Re: Noise Comparison A610, A630 and S3IS
« Reply #2 on: 05 / April / 2009, 16:07:49 »
Well, I'm sorry for A610 users, I could not take 100 and 200 iso pictures, because of my friend was taking pictures! ???
Well, not so sorry, because as you will see, it is as GREAT camera!^^

So here are the 100 and 200 iso crops...
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Offline A630Lover

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Re: Noise Comparison A610, A630 and S3IS
« Reply #3 on: 05 / April / 2009, 16:10:16 »
At 200 ISO, you can begin to see not only a difference in detail, but also a noise increase for the S3. Nothing too serious however.
Now the 400 ISO crops:
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Offline A630Lover

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Re: Noise Comparison A610, A630 and S3IS
« Reply #4 on: 05 / April / 2009, 16:19:19 »
Ok! So the A610 is back! What can we notice? There is more noise in the A610 crop, but it is also sharper than the other two. Not to mention that the S3 really begins to struggle with noise/noise suppression. Oh, remember that the 400 ISO crop of the A610 can be compared to the 800 ISO crops of the other two ;)
So here they come! (I post the 400 ISO crop from the A610 again, just to make the comparison easier)
And just for info purpose, I also shot a...shot at 800 ISO with dark frame substraction turned on on the A630. It's rather clear that this option increases noise levels, especially at 400 an 800 ISO.
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Offline A630Lover

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Re: Noise Comparison A610, A630 and S3IS
« Reply #5 on: 05 / April / 2009, 16:36:46 »
Ok, so what we see here is that the grand'pa A610 is giving these kids a run for their money!
Not only it is way sharper, but noise levels are lower, also. The A630 tries to reduce noise by reducing sharpening. It works to a certain extent, but it won't do miracles. The S3 is totally overwhelmed by what's happening :P . The noise explodes, and the fine details are almost all gone.

Well, here it is! Hope you enjoyed the comparison! Now you see the evolution of the "quality".
If I had a newer camera with a digic III or even digic IV processor, the result would have been less noisy, but the detail would have been lost, maybe even more badly than on the S3. Even if the new processors are much more powerful, they cannot do miracles. But just imagine a second a 1/1.8" 5 megapixels sensor like the one in the a610 with a new stabilized lens and the digic 4 processor! Below you will find the 400 ISO crop from the A610 filtered in NeatImage. That's probably the kind of result you could expect from the digic IV sensor.

Finally, yes, there MAY be a gain in resolution when using a more pixel-packed sensor, but: 1) it is only visible at the lowest sensitivity 2) when the sensitivity increases, the difference is cancelled, and finally inverted in favor of the less megapixel sensor. So I would say that for a compact camera, a good 5Mpix is clearly enough, even for big prints. Hope the megapixel race will finally end, because all I see is that the image quality is decreasing as the megapixel count goes up.
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Offline PS

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Re: Noise Comparison A610, A630 and S3IS
« Reply #6 on: 08 / April / 2009, 13:41:07 »
Why not RAW samples? :'( Comparison would be more objective then.
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bugmenot

Re: Noise Comparison A610, A630 and S3IS
« Reply #7 on: 08 / April / 2009, 18:02:53 »
you should try Topaz Denoise too. Noise Ninja is stone age compared to it. I do iso 800 shots on my Canon a710 and are quite usefull after I run Topaz Adjust on them. Too bad it works 4 minute on the picture to remove the noise, but hey it's worth it
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Offline RaduP

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Re: Noise Comparison A610, A630 and S3IS
« Reply #8 on: 09 / April / 2009, 03:33:41 »
Yes, I would also like to see a RAW. The P&S cameras add way too much processing (NR and sharpening) so it is hard to know how the images shold look like :/
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Offline A630Lover

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Re: Noise Comparison A610, A630 and S3IS
« Reply #9 on: 09 / April / 2009, 06:11:44 »
Thanks for the input!
Well, I just wanted to see what the result would be using "raw" jpegs :p
But if you want, I can do some raw comparison, but only between my A630 and the S3, because I don't have the A610 anymore :(
Concerning noise reduction, I use neat image, which I think is great. From my experience, it is far better than noise ninja. But thanks for the tip, I will also try Topaz, and maybe do a little comparison between neat image and Topaz.
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