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Is 'noise' such a big deal?


pgk

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The longer I shoot digital images, the less I worry about 'noise'. Today's cameras are all good and noise is considerably lower than it ever has been. To the point I would say, that unless we are talking about extremes, for a lot of photography its no longer a big issue. In any case I am now not that bothered about a bit of shadow noise - the content of the mage is far more important. There are of course exceptions as there always will be, but in general noise is pretty much a non-issue these days. Many of the 'reviews' which major on the nuances of differences between the latest and last models of cameras in terms of their ability to deal with noise - seem somewhat pointless to me. Unless a new sensor comes along which makes real advances I suspect that advances will be incremental and marginal at that. So why do so many get hung up on the very latest technology when it is not really significantly better than that which it replaces - especially terms of noise?

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And especially when most aspirational photographers buying a new camera go on the outright specification, high ISO and all, and then still set their ISO at the lowest range for fear of imagining their image quality will be a laughing stock (amongst their peers, but nobody else really cares because it wasn't any good anyway).

 

Steve

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There is also the point that our perception has gotten used to film "noise" aka grain for over 100 years, and that our all too human mind likes what it is used to. Who would like Tri-X if it were digital noise? Digital noise is new and thus disturbing. Slowly we are being habituated...

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Paul,

 

I suspect that people who get hung up on the newest, shiniest specifications are as much concerned with keeping up with the Joneses as they are with appreciating good photographs.

 

As far as I'm concerned noise is only of concern to me when it intrudes into a picture to the extent that it's distracting me from the subject or narrative.  To me this is no different from bokeh disks, fringing, coma, spherical aberration, stray objects etc becoming a distraction.  But then we all probably have different thresholds ...

 

Pete.

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