To measure and compare the Panasonic Lumix TZ3's noise levels we photographed the standard Gretag Macbeth ColorChecker with it and a number of rivals at each of their ISO settings. We've included the Fujifilm F30 here as it represents one of the better compacts when it comes to noise.

The crops are taken from the original images and presented here at 100%. To compare typical noise in skies and dark shadows the crops were taken from patches 3 and 24 respectively.

The Panasonic Lumix TZ3 appears to deliver very smooth and clean results at lower sensitivities with noise textures only really appearing at 400 ISO and above. Results from the Gretag chart though can be quite deceptive as areas of flat colour can hide a number of evils. It is however interesting to see how the TZ3 handles noise and noise reduction compared to the Lumix FZ8. This higher-end camera appears to suffer from more apparent noise at each ISO setting.

As always though you need to compare results of real-life subjects to see what's really going on, so click onto the next page to compare the output of the TZ3 and FZ8 outdoors at each of their sensitivities.