Den Lenni from Fstopacademy posted the very frist A7s low light video test (scroll at the bottom of his site to find the video).
The image on very top shows you the quality at ISO 409,600. But before to cry about the grain and nosie you see you have to check the same scene at ISO 6,400:
As you see there is no light at all in the room! So it’s quite a miracle that you actually CAN SEE something at ISO 409,600!
And up to ISO 102,400 the noise isn’t really bad at all:
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4 Responses
The very word _photo_graphy means it’s about light. This is all very interesting but I don’t get this obsession about taking photos where there is no light. Even night-sky photographers rarely use ISO above 1600. This is useful for surveillance stuff.
The obsession is this: If you can take video or photographs that are just about useable at ISO 400,000… then you will likely have a camera that can produce results better than the competition at say, 6400 ISO.
What this really means is that if they can do this with 12MP on FF, they should be able to pull a usable 102400 on 12MP MFT cameras with a similar next generation sensor. Basically, next gen MFT could do as well in low light as current gen full frame, all else being equal. I imagine there are a lot of people who wouldn’t mind 8-10MP if it meant full-frame low light performance in a smaller and lighter package.
All that being said, I’m more than happy with the results I get at 3200 and 6400 on the E-M5 for medium sized prints and web. It just shows us that there’s lots of room for improvement.
Sony likes to create hype for marketing – for awhile it was a MP war and Sony liked being a winner but most realized that MP is nice but 16MP was a good compromise withe current sensor technology so Sony needed something new so it became a FF in a small body but the A7/r have had some issues and cameras like the Fuji Xt1 and OMD em1 and em10 have been very popular so now Sony has reversed it self with only a 12 MP camera Not that the idea is bad and of course not new but just smells of a marketing hype the ISO hype
I still think we are ways of before we can use ISO much higher than 3200 although few large FF cameras like the Nikon D4s are better than the rest I think the sensors will improve year by year but still years off