Q2 High ISO Noise

[Jared]

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Hello, all those of you considering the purchase of the Q2.  One of the items that is a "knock" against the Q2 is that according to some it has high ISO performance that is actually worse than its predecessor, the Q.  I did a little testing last night to see if that was the case.  I shot a piece of furniture in my living room at ISO 6400, f/4.5, 1/400s on both the Q2 and on the Q. Here is what I found.

- Viewing the images at 200%, the Q2 was clearly noisier.  It was also about half a stop darker, so it appears the Q has a bit more gain at 6400  than the Q2.

- To make the comparison "fair" (adjusting for the fact that the Q is only 24 megapixels which gives it a huge noise advantage), I down-sampled the Q2 image to 6,000px x 4,000px which is the same resolution as the Q has natively.  If I am perfectly honest, the Q still had a slight luminance noise advantage, I'd guess about half a stop.  Dynamic range between the two was similar with the Q2 clipping a bit more in shadow details and the Q clipping a bit more in highlights.  Basically, this matched up with the half stop of additional sensitivity the Q seems to possess at the ISO 6400 rating.

- To see what the Q was really capable of, I took a series of 13 images in a one second burst, all hand held, then aligned and median stacked them in Affinity Photo on the iPad.  This made a HUGE difference in the noise level (as you would expect) and also slightly improved the detail of the image, I expect because virtually no noise reduction in the color channel was required in the stacked frames since all aliasing was removed.

I'm attaching a link to a Flickr gallery where you can see the full frame, a 200% screen grab from the iPad of the single frame, and a 200% screen grab of the stack of 13 frames.  

Honestly, the ISO 6400 single frame was perfectly usable with either camera for most purposes, but the Q definitely had a very slight edge in noise performance.  

Here is the link to the gallery of three images...

https://flic.kr/s/aHsmEH31Ea

Please, no lectures on the lack of artistic merit to this test.  It's actually a reasonably good way to evaluate noise performance--plenty of fine, low contrast detail in the fabric cover of the book, plus some higher contrast detail in the bar code label, all within the same plane of focus.  

End result is that I will probably shoot the Q2 in much the same manner as I did the Q in terms of ISO selection.  I'd be very comfortable at ISO 3200 for anything up to an 8"x10" print, maybe even ISO 6400 if I really nailed the exposure and the subject wasn't too dependent on shadow details.  Above 6400?  I'd have to be desperate or just need a web-sized image.  Oh, and I found the colors a touch more accurate in the Q2 than in the Q under these conditions.  After manually setting the white balance in each, I found the Q needed the saturation dropped a touch on reds and oranges to convey accurate hues in the wood.  The Q2 didn't need that.

- Jared

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