Noise Test Comparison : Nikon D750, D800, D4, D7100, D7000, D600 And more

Noise Test Comparison : Nikon D750, D800, D4, D7100, D7000, D600, Canon 5D mark II, 7D and Sony Alpha 6000, Canon 5D mark 3, 1d Mark 3, 1D Mark 4, 6D

I wanted to see how the new nikons compared with the older nikons, and also some older Canons. I also had access to a new Sony Alpha 6000. I will be adding Canon 6D, 5D mark III amongst others.

update added more canons

I’ve added 6d, 5D3, 1d4, 1d3 and 100d to the selection below. The 1d3 doesn’t go that high though so i’ve pushed it 1 stop in post so it’s a little brighter.

Obviously Low light is a important test for lots of people. Here I’ve cropped the centre part of a target shot in aperture priority at either f/4 ( DX cameras) or f/5.6 on Full frame cameras. This mirrors real world usage where you can use a stop wider of DX bodies to get equivalent depth of field. This makes more sense than shooting at the same apertures across sensor formats as you’d shoot at a given aperture for a certain effect.

The results are below with the cameras and ISO inline on the image (I used ISO12,800 as this should be sufficient to show differences with noise performance). All were shot in RAW, for the d750 however I used the JPGs as RAW conversion is still in BETA.

D4

d600

d800

d750 converted using beta version of DNG converter

d750 (JPG)

7D

D7100

Sony Alpha 6000

d7000

canon 5d Mark II

CANON 1d3 at ISO6400 pushed 1 stop to ISO12800 in post

Canon 1d4 at ISO 12,800

CANON 6d at iso 12,800

CANON 100d at iso 12,800

Noise Conclusions

The d800, D750, D4 and D600 do the best in these tests. All appear very similar at this size. The D750 JPG were used because there is still no official RAW convert from Adobe and I didn’t want to use the Release candidate at this stage. The cropped bodies do surprisingly well given the ISO’s involved and although there is no colour in this chart I can’t see anyone complaining about the grain of these cameras in black and white.

I look forward to your comments below.

RAW FILES Available to download

You can download the RAW files from this test to take a look yourself here.