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Photos and image samples: Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ18

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November 19, 2007 10:32 AM PST

Noise conundrum, Part I

My first take on the FZ18's noise test shots was "Eek!" While the ruler text, graphics' board and currency look okay and sharp on the ISO 100 JPEG shot (right), the book text shows color noise that appears throughout the light areas on the test shots. I opened the raw version of the shot with Adobe Camera Raw (left), and, as you can see, the noise completely disappears with the trade off of just a bit of sharpness. The noise in the JPEG photos is exacerbated by poor white balance--the tungsten preset under tungsten lights, our standard test setup, yielded results that were far yellower than normal--and much of the noise disappears when the white balance is corrected, which you can only do properly in raw.

Photo credit: CNET Labs

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