12,800 ISO on X-T100 — what is this sorcery?

Erik Baumgartner wrote:

KneeConWon wrote:

Taken with a Fuji X-T100 and Fuji 15-45mm kit lens at 12,800 ISO and 1/7 second handheld during dusk.

Image was taken in JPG with noise reduction and sharpening each set to minus 2 (the lowest setting on the camera). The only edit made in post was raising the brightness slightly (which obviously only increases noise).

I can't see any color noise, and I can only see "grain" if I zoom in to 100%. And the image appears sharp and vibrant at any normal viewing sizes.

How the heck is Fuji doing this? I'm pretty dang impressed — not only with the iso performance, but with the in-lens stabilization, and with the X-T100 + 15-45mm lens combination in general. It's so great that I haven't needed any other lenses for the system. It's effectively my perfect everyday fixed-lens compact camera that can take good photos of almost anything. I love its simplicity and versatility.

If the quality of light is halfway decent, ISO 12800 is usually very usable with a modern APS-C camera.

I didn't realize the quality of light affected the level of noise. Thanks for the insight!

With a little additional NR and a quick tweak it looks even cleaner. That 15-45 is a good little lens. Not super sharp here, but hey, it's at 1/8". My 16-55 would likely look significantly worse. at 1/8"

Great edit! The noise is definitely smoother. I never use noise reduction in post for fear of losing detail, but I should give it consideration.

I'm surprised you were able to brighten the photo without blowing out any highlights, as I thought I had already pushed it as far as it would go before such happened. It also appears you adjusted the white balance — I'll admit I got lazy, considering Fuji's excellent auto white balance, and determined the color already looked good without needing to mess with it — either in camera or in post.

Your post has been very illuminating. Thank you!