To measure and compare the Fujifilm F30’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 F30’s crops below appear very clean up to 800 ISO, with noise artefacts only really appearing at 1600 and 3200 ISO.

Overall this looks like a fantastic result for the F30, but it’s important to note the solid colours of the Gretag chart can mask a multitude of sins, especially in terms of overly-aggressive noise reduction. It’s crucial to also compare real-life results from outdoor subjects as seen on the next pages.

When you examine real-life results, the F30 is capable of delivering clean and detailed images up to 400 ISO with the quality only really falling at 800 ISO and above. That said, the results at 800 and 1600 ISO, as seen on the next page and in our Gallery, are surprisingly usable for a compact, making the F30 an ideal choice for anyone who likes to shoot under dim conditions without a flash.

Note: we have compared 100% crops from each camera here measuring 136×136 pixels. Since the Fujifilm F30 and Panasonic TZ1 employ lower resolution sensors, their crops represent a larger area of their total image size than the Canon A640 and Sony N2 crops. As such, any artefacts seen on the Fujifilm F30 and Panasonic TZ1 crops would appear slightly larger than those on the other crops if the original images were printed exactly the same size.