Nikon P7700 vs Canon PowerShot G15 Noise JPEG
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To compare noise levels under real-life conditions, I shot this scene with the Nikon Coolpix P7700 and Canon PowerShot G15 within a few moments of each other using their best quality JPEG settings at each of their ISO sensitivity settings.
The zoom on both cameras was set to its maximum wide angle, 6mm on the P7700 and 6.1mm on the G15, providing an approximately equivalent fields of view.
Image stabilisation was disabled for this tripod-mounted test and all other settings were left on the defaults. |
The image above was taken with the Nikon Coolpix P7700. The camera was set to Aperture priority mode with the aperture set to f2 and the sensitivity to 80 ISO. The Coolpix P7700 metered an exposure of 1.3 seconds at f2, with exposure compensation set to +1EV to produce a sufficiently bright image with a histogram in the middle of the chart. With exposure compensation similarly set on the PowerShot G15 it metered 1 second at f2.
As with the outdoor test results, this is a pretty impressive set of crops from the Coolpix P7700. The 80 ISO crop is clean, bright and hard to fault either on quality or noise grounds. Except that I am going to make one minor criticism and that is that this crop does have a fine overall texture to it. It's barely visible and only noticeable looking at these 100 percent crops, but it's there all the same. It becomes a little more apparent at 200 ISO, especially in the wall on the right side and in the text panel of the memorial, but it's still pretty subtle and you'd need to be looking for it to find it.
At 400 ISO though, there's a very definite hike in the P7700's noise levels. The granularity is now pretty apparent in the walls and the previously crisp, clean and well defined edges are starting to look a little crumbly. 400 ISO is still easily good enough for full sized prints though. At 800 ISO there's another significant hike in noise levels and we're now getting close to the stage where noise and true image detail start to compete for supremacy. That point is reached at 1600 ISO and beyond it, while you might get away with it a smaller sizes, at 100 percent the noise obscures image detail to the extent that you're really only getting a rough impression.
Compared with the crops from the Nikon Coolpix P7700 it has to be said the PowerShot G15's performance looks a little lacklustre. The P7700 gets off to a great start, with 80 and 100 ISO crops that are crisp and sparkling with nice clean edges. At 200 and 400 ISO the Nikon crops show much more detail with cleaner edges, there's more graininess in the wall, but I'll take that over the softness of the G15 crops. I think it's fair to say that up to 800 ISO the P7700 has a clear lead all the way. At 1600 ISO I'd still give it to the P7700 but arguably its clumpy fuzz is equally offensive, if qualitatively different to the mushy G15. At 3200 and 6400 ISO I think the fine granularity of the Canon crops is preferable to the hard clumpy buzz of the Nikon's, but at this level neither is retaining a great deal of worthwhile image detail.
To find out how much of a role processing plays in keeping noise at bay in these crops take a look at my Nikon P7700 RAW noise results page to see just how much noise is present behind the scenes. Or head over to my Nikon Coolpix P7700 sample images to see some more real-life shots in a variety of conditions.
Nikon Coolpix P7700 |
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Canon Powershot G15 |
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80 ISO |
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80 ISO |
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100 ISO |
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100 ISO |
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200 ISO |
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200 ISO |
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400 ISO |
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400 ISO |
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800 ISO |
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800 ISO |
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1600 ISO |
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1600 ISO |
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3200 ISO |
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3200 ISO |
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6400 ISO |
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6400 ISO |
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12800 ISO Not available |
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12800 ISO |
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