To measure and compare the Panasonic Lumix FZ8’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.

Unlike many cameras in this particular test, the Panasonic Lumix FZ8 shows some noise speckles even at its lowest sensitivities. The flat colours of the Gretag chart often hide the effects of smearing through noise reduction, but it’s interesting to note the FZ8 does indeed show visible speckles in real-life results even at 100 ISO. These become progressively more obvious in the samples below, until smearing from noise reduction really becomes apparent at 800 ISO and beyond.

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 FZ8 and Sony H9 outdoors at each of their sensitivities. We’ll also show you the differences between the FZ8’s different noise reduction settings.