ISO Sensitivity / Noise levels (contd.)

In-camera High ISO noise reduction

The D300 has four different levels of noise reduction; Off, Low, Normal and High (with Normal as the default). The good news is that the Normal setting is tuned quite nicely to give a good answer to the compromise between noise levels and detail and that the latitude of adjustment between 'Off' and 'High' is great enough for this option to be useful. If you have your own noise reduction workflow or prefer your images with no potential NR smearing you can choose the Off option, if you want to avoid noise almost completely and aren't too concerned that detail may be compromised High is for you.

Indicated ISO sensitivity is on the horizontal axis of this graph, standard deviation of luminosity on the vertical axis (note that the standard deviation scale here has been extended 3x compared to the graphs on the previous page).

Noise reduction crop comparisons (ISO 800 - 6400)

ISO 800 NR Off	ISO 800 NR Low	ISO 800 NR Normal	ISO 800 NR High
ISO 1600 NR Off	ISO 1600 NR Low	ISO 1600 NR Normal	ISO 1600 NR High
ISO 3200 NR Off	ISO 3200 NR Low	ISO 3200 NR Normal	ISO 3200 NR High
ISO 6400 NR Off	ISO 6400 NR Low	ISO 6400 NR Normal	ISO 6400 NR High