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Cleaner fw 2.014?


lct

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Because there is a tiny bit of art in photography perhaps? ;)

 

There is indeed but I see no evidence of it in these posts which are all concerned with wether the new firmware has reduced noise. This is purely technical. My "complaint" is the discussion is technical but all the assessments are subjective.

I also would like to know and understand the curiosity but multiple posts of single shots without accurate measurements is getting us no where.

 

I know the answer before you post stop reading the thread :D:D

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Curiosity got the better of me so I did a couple of quick test shots before and after upgrading the firmware.

 

Obviously I was crazy enough to do this, but hope it'd benefit the discussion here. Both photos were shot indoors (at night, so there were no extraneous light sources) under a single ceiling light bulb. Photos were taken at from a tripod (to achieve identical framing), triggered by a 12 second self-timer, ISO 2500, same white balance (I checked during the process of converting DNG to JPEG files), same lens, aperture (f/8) and shutter speed (0"7 sec) for a +1/3 stop exposure compensation and same point of focus.

 

LeicaImageNoiseComparison.jpg

 

To my mind at least, there are very few differences between the two. Subjectively things may be worse AFTER the firmware upgrade, but the difference is so small I couldn't tell you which was which in a double-blind test.

 

Call me mad, but I am not the slightest bit disappointed with the high ISO performance of the M8 whichever way we cut it. This comes from having used a Canon 1Ds MKI that only went to ISO 1250 (photos were grainy but sharp) and a Fujifilm S5 Pro that goes to ISO 3200 (photos have less chrominance noise but soft). With a bit of chrominance noise reduction in Lightroom, the results are completely usable IMO. I've never liked silky-smooth noise-free images however, which probably explains my high tolerance to image noise.

 

Image noise ain't gonna make or break the image IMHO, especially as unobstrusive as they are from today's cameras.

 

Bottom-line is, this is a very interesting discussion. I'd be very glad if there were genuine improvements to image quality as a result of this firmware. But even without that, man, I love my 'vaniila', unadulterated M8.

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I've been taking tonight some pictures at ISO 1250.

 

I don't see any noise improvement but something has changed.I really don't know. I wonder if some color corrections and/or a sharpen algorithm improvement give me this impression.

 

I also did some tests and can't see a difference in noise.

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Measuring the noise in the samples Andrew posted, the noise in the image captured with 2.014 is actually lower by 5.9% compared to that captured with 2.005. Noise is defined as the standard deviation of the distribution (StdDev in the summary table).

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Measuring the noise in the samples Andrew posted, the noise in the image captured with 2.014 is actually lower by 5.9% compared to that captured with 2.005. Noise is defined as the standard deviation of the distribution (StdDev in the summary table).

Luminance noise is indeed slightly lower while chrominance noise looks worse. The two squares don’t cover the exact same area, though, so the result may be skewed.

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Luminance noise is indeed slightly lower while chrominance noise looks worse. The two squares don’t cover the exact same area, though, so the result may be skewed.
Oy, you are spoiling the fun;)
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While Michael's comments are valid, mmk60's remarks are completely irrelevant. Sensor noise measurements include temporal noise estimation where about 100 frames are needed to get valid statistics, and spatial noise estimation - which is what was performed here from 7650 pixels - where a single frame is fine.

Edited by Bert N
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+1 +1 +1 :)

Bottom-line is, this is a very interesting discussion. I'd be very glad if there were genuine improvements to image quality as a result of this firmware. But even without that, man, I love my 'vaniila', unadulterated M8.

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Cleaner fw 2.014?

Just did a quick test at 640 iso. Noise is still here but grain looks finer and less lumpy. Is it me?

I agree

and i confirm that the preview is much faster than before.

images are much better in DNG : so working in DNG

I'm even down to 1250 and 2500 without any problems

same remark on M9

i'll post pictures

Best

Henry

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