Walking through the local town recently I took some night time shots with my Sony RX100 MkIII. I had got the camera set to a high ISO setting as I was taking hand held shots. When viewing the photos on the computer I was pleasantly pleased with the results from this little compact camera. This seemed to be lacking in the digital noise that I was expecting to see so I decided on a revisit to test out the camera further.
It was raining slightly so there was a sheen on the road surface. I set the exposure compensation to minus 1 so that I could register some deep blacks which should show up any digital noise in the photos. I took all the photos with the Rich Tome Mono setting which takes three images and stitches them together. I started off with this shot with the ISO set to 3200, which looks pretty good.
This is the same image cropped to 1600 x 1200 pixels.
I then pushed up the ISO to 8000 which again, isn’t bad. I would expect to see more noise within the black areas.
This time I started off at and ISO level of 8000.
The image above cropped to 1600 x 1200.
I then increased the ISO to it’s maximum of 12800.
The image above cropped to 1600 x 1200.
The RX100 seems to be an ideal small camera for night time shooting when you want to carry a compact and not want to carry round a tripod.
I’ll be going out again soon to do some more photos using a couple of my micro four thirds cameras as a comparison.
Nicks Pics 