Which New Body for High ISO?

Jerry-astro wrote:

And-roid wrote:

Enshong wrote:

Kaoticphoto wrote:

Imho you have 3 options:

Shoot with a faster (1.4) lens

Start using dxo (pureraw2, PL6) with ai NR

Migrate to a larger sensor

Unfortunately, the last option seems to be frowned upon in this forum because some people just can't accept physics.

It is truly amazing what dxo can do at higher iso, try it? Larger sensor just impose different challenges, physics is also your friend with crop!

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Bottom line: larger sensors will always have an inherent advantage. The question is whether the additional cost and size is worth the actual difference you'll see and whether your own photography will sufficiently benefit to justify using a FF sensor.

Precisely.

And, as was pointed out, there are some superb tools to deal with NR that minimize loss of detail.

But, of course those same tools can be used with the same effect, or better, on shots from FF sensors, so FF at least retains it advantage.  I say, "or better" because a higher pixel count gives these tools more data to work with. One can often get a greater apparent improvement from these tools on a higher pixel count original, and the higher -res FF sensors have higher pixel counts than any APS-C sensor.

OTOH, higher pixel count sensors tend to have more read noise than lower pixel-count sensors, so at the same low exposure, the higher-res sensor is starting out behind the lower-res sensor of the same sensor size.  The read noise disadvantage of higher pixel counts is not as big as the shot noise disadvantage APS-C has relative to FF, so current high-res FF sensors still outperform the best APS-C sensors when processed with the same NR. It may be possible that an APS-C image processed with advanced NR might look less noisy than a high-res FF image that didn't have NR applied.

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But, by all means, let's hash this totally overworked topic again the n-thousandth time. I'm sure there's at least someone out there who hasn't seen it all before. [sigh] [yawn]

What would be helpful to the OP would be a comparison of high ISO performance among the various Fuji models. This will show that there has been no meaningful improvement since about the X-T3, and in fact, several subsequent Fujifilm cameras have regressed slightly in DR and SNR while progressing in other areas, such as AF.

Then compare this high ISO performance to that of FF cameras, and see that the biggest bang-for-buck improvement in these factors comes from some of the lower MP FF models like the Nikon Z6 or Z6II and the Sony a73 (and not the Canon R6 or Sony a72).