Removing digital noise

Now that I have had a chance to play with my new camera, I can show you what I meant by digital noise in my previous post.

All Panasonic cameras are noted for producing digital noise; even at their slowest film speed settings (100ASA in the case of the FX30). Other manufacturers get over this problem by building noise reduction into the software of  the camera but in some cases this has the side effect of making their images look soft.

Fortunately there is an alternative which is to use noise reduction software once the photographs have been transferred to the computer.

There are several programs that will do this. The one I am using is Neat Image.

The following photographs demonstrate the effect of using this software.

Full size image taken at 400ASA

Crop at 800% (taken from the house top left) showing the level of digital noise in the original

Crop at 800% of the image processed using Neat Image.

Of course images taken at slower film speeds are much better than this. Thankfully,  the FX30 has two features which enable me to mostly use the camera at 100ASA.

1. A wide aperture lens - f2.8 at 4.6mm (28mm 25mm film equivalent) NB cameras with  f4 lenses e.g. my Fuji compact only let in half the light of this camera.

2. Optical image stabilisation which means I can use slow shutter speeds without the blurring caused by camera shake.

So overall I am pleased with my  purchase. The camera is very compact and well built.  It produces crisp detailed images with good colour saturation as you might expect from a camera with a Leica heritage. And with a little post processing in my computer, the resulting pictures are clean without loss of detail.