DPReview.com is closing April 10th - Find out more

Tiny 1-inch Sensor in Low Light

Started Jan 3, 2019 | Photos thread
John Sheehy Forum Pro • Posts: 26,688
Re: Tiny 1-inch Sensor in Low Light

Luisifer wrote:

In low light it is every time better to use low ISO (+-100) and long exposure whether if the sensor is large or small. (with camera on tripod)

(it depends what you are shooting ... if low light street photo or night landscape or ... and what is your intention)

High ISOs are mainly for limiting exposure time, at this point in time. No point in using them because light is weak; the only question is how long an exposure your needed stability can tolerate. Many cameras now have a night mode that stacks multiple exposures and combines them after aligning them (roughly, of course, in many cases, just by whole-pixel shifts horizontally and vertically in the crudest cases, most likely), but that limits the length of a motion blur, in pixels.

I suspect that when we finally have consumer cameras with only photon noise and no camera-added noise, however, that intentional low exposure might become a fad, as pure photon noise is actually kind of charming in its own way. Current images seem to suffer more than they would from just the photon noise element, because of the way it combines with camera-generated read noise to push it's spatially-correlated outliers further "out". Also, high photon noise generally parallels low exposure in the presence of the read noise; an association.

Keyboard shortcuts:
FForum PPrevious NNext WNext unread UUpvote SSubscribe RReply QQuote BBookmark MMy threads
Color scheme? Blue / Yellow