Compact and competent

SC489 wrote:

I don't see any obvious noise from my GX7 in normal shooting conditions. Are you shooting in RAW mode and what RAW processor are you using? I've only seen obvious noise in very low level light at high ISO settings. In that case I use DXO Optics Pro Prime noise reduction which does a pretty good job in reducing the noise.

At ISO 200 it really requires pixel peeping at 100% so is largely irrelevant except maybe for the occasional noisy sky which can easily be taken care of. Not sure what size of print it would show up in. I shoot raw and process in ACR>Photoshop CS4. In camera noise reduction should be at lowest setting, only can't find it right now (not sure it affects raw anyway). I have tried DxO and while it handles noise very nicely and certainly better than I can with PS, it doesn't read RW2 or DNG files (the free version that is) so I'd need to convert to tif first but haven't got around to try that. My take on noise is from a 3 week trip to Hong Kong where I tried to get acquainted with the GX7 and shot in all kinds of different conditions and made lots of mistakes with exposure and learned that ETTR is the way to go. I did get some quite OK pics at ISO 1600 but wouldn't like to go any higher. Whether noise is a problem very much depends on the subject. Busy scenes with lots of high contrast detail look fine. Faces seem to suffer most. Back home I am in no hurry and can use a tripod so the noise issue is irrelevant for most of what I do. Don't want to make a big issue of the noise - it's not that bad - but if I did lots of low light people stuff I would probably go for a Sony A7 to be on the safe side.