One of the main reasons for buying the Nikon D7000 and semi-retiring the D200 was the massive advances made in noise control at high ISO settings. Whilst this camera is not in the same league as the FX (Full Frame) Nikons (D700, D3x etc), the D7000 does a pretty damn spiffing job. I wanted to see if ISO 25,600 on the Nikon D7000 could produce a useable image, or whether it was just there for show. I can confirm that, with a little work this photographer is pleased. This test is only concerned with producing images for web use – your mileage may well differ if you need to make some large prints.

The first shot is straight off the camera – just re-sized and cropped. The noise is clearly noticeable but at such a high ISO on a cropped sensor I still find this remarkable. The D200 doesn’t look this clean at ISO 1,600.

Whilst the results are already pretty spectacular in my opinion, I wanted to see how well Topaz DeNoise would cope with the image. The image below is the result of applying the standard preset ‘JPG Large Grain Severe Noise’ and telling the software to recover details. I then made a couple of colour tweaks in Photoshop CS3.

Whilst you will always lose some details with this aggressive level of noise reduction, I still think Domino looks pretty good. Good enough to make my blog anyway.

Domino on the landing. Post snooze. For the photo geeks this was shot at iso5000. That makes me happy.

After another heavy ‘Da Bird’ session, Domino was left panting. Like a dog. Mad little bugger.