JPEG engine noise in NX100 vs NX200

"As long as you don't try to boost the shadows much it will do pretty nicely. It tends to clip highlights easily because it is exposed to the right to reduce the appearance of shadow noise. " Well said - thanks for sharing!

it validates my findings and most of the anecdotal evidence i found about the NX100... the K-7 sensor was average wrt. noise and DR, and worse than average in high roll-off (white clipping). When (under)exposed as a 'stiff' slide, it produced clean RAWs... iff there were enough photons for the blacks (left histogram sufficiently exposed - despite the contradiction).

Its (14.6Mp chip) demerits got probably aggravated by the mods required for LiveView operation: Such sensors must work much harder (continously), hotter, more thermal noise. Hence i surmise that the NX sensor version is worse in practical operation than its K-7 father.

Returning to the OP, this somewhat challenged sensor is not helped at all by what appears to be one of industry's worst JPEG engines, as in my NX100. Samsung has done many things right w/ NX and deserve plenty of credit for quite a list of achievements. However, it's hard to find today a worse JPEG engine than NX100 (i can't speak about the other NX)

What's more disturbing is a common attitude of tolerance toward such underperforming engine from users saying "shoot RAW!" (which i was doing 10 yrs ago and got enough of it). Surely we can all buy LR/ACR and a few more years of life staring in our 4-9Mpix screens attempting to fix Samsung's JPG engine (slopiness, laziness?) . Or eventually get a Fuji X, Oly, canikon etc... which render justice to their sensors w/ decent JPEGs. [ok, i bluff here, because they all have their other issues, though not JPG...] Mitch

viking79 wrote:

I would guess the 14.6 MP is one of the worst on the market in terms of image noise, especially at high ISO. Not that it is a bad sensor, as I think it can produce extremely nice images. I think with careful noise reduction you can make it better.

I used the Pentax K-7 for about 30,000 exposures. It has the same sensor as the NX 5, 10/11, and 100. As long as you don't try to boost the shadows much it will do pretty nicely. It tends to clip highlights easily because it is exposed to the right to reduce the appearance of shadow noise. Look at test images and you will often see the K-7 or others with the same sensor using longer shutter speeds for the same brightness image.

So it isn't that it is bad, but other reasonably new sensors are much better in terms of ISO noise. The 14.6 MP is probably fairly comparable in terms of noise to most MFT sensors, but is significantly better at lower ISO since it goes to ISO 100 instead of just 200.

Eric
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