To measure and compare the Panasonic Lumix FX30's noise levels we photographed the standard Gretag Macbeth ColorChecker with it and a number of rival models at each of their ISO settings.

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 FX30's crops below appear clean at 100 and 200 ISO, but noise becomes apparent at 400 ISO and up.

Interestingly the Gretag chart frequently hides the evils of image processing in its flat colour swatches, but the effect of noise and noise reduction as the FX30's sensitivity is increased remain quite apparent here.

To see the impact of increasing the sensitivity on real-life subjects, check our FX30 Outdoor Noise page.

Note: we have compared 100% crops from each camera here measuring 136x136 pixels. Since each camera employs a different resolution sensor though, the actual crops represent slightly different areas of their respective images. In practice this actually makes very little difference, but technically speaking, the artefacts on the Fuji F30 crops would appear slightly larger than those on the higher resolution models if all images were output the same size.