12/29/10
I hope everyone had a peaceful Christmas weekend, I did, and the fact that It was about 70° (21°c) and sunny in Tucson this weekend made it even better. Unfortunately, many of you are still digging yourselves out of a massive snowstorm(!) On the bright side, that makes for some great picture taking…right?
I’m waiting on a Sony A580 (without kit lens), unfortunately, they’re on back-order, so I’m going to hold off on my tests as mentioned in the last update below until I get one.
This site has a high ISO comparison between the Sony A580 and Nikon 7000. At first glance it looks like the Sony is a little bit behind the curve, but reality suggests a different outcome. More importantly, and more noticeable is the exposure levels are not the same. Cameralabs say they compensated by using -0.3eV, but it looks like they should have pulled back almost a full stop on the Nikon. That’s odd, if the Sony is not taking in as much light as the Nikon, the noise levels will predictably be higher in actual shooting. Most likely the lens aperture openings are not quite the same, or the sensitivity is not the same between the cameras, although they do hint at that issue in their ISO 3200 paragraph. They also tested the trick multi-frame high ISO on the Sony, the link to that page is here. Based on my quick test of that feature on the A33, you could get the same basic results by shooting in RAW and doing some of your own noise reduction processing in dedicated noise software, such as Neat Image, (which I use).