The World of Mr. Newit

TEST: High ISO Panasonic GF1 and Canon T1i

This test is a comparison of the noise level encountered when increasing the ISO settings of a Panasonic GF1 and a Canon Rebel T1i. I find the T1i's ISO performance acceptable for my night time, indoor uses. The much smaller sensored GF1 seems to lag behind. The purpose of this test is to see exactly how far behind the little camera is using my standard importing and noise reduction procedures.

Cameras: The Panasonic is a DMC-GF1 with a H-H020 20mm f/1.7 lens. The Canon is a Rebel T1i with a Sigma 30mm f/1.4 lens. All shots were taken at f/4 and the histograms for each camera seemed to allow the same shutter speed for each ISO setting.

Process: The pictures were all shot from a tripod using the camera's RAW output. These RAW files were imported through Adobe Lightroom 3 Beta using the standard settings. These settings include a noise reduction (color noise 25, edge detail 50) and a sharpening (amount 25, radius 1.0, detail 25). All pictures were set at a white balance temperature of 3500.

The first batch of pictures are 100% crops, 801 pixels wide using the native aspect ratio of each sensor. You will note the difference in zoom due to the Canon's higher resolution sensor.

This second batch of pictures used a 4X5 crop to highlight the same field of view. As we tend to take pictures of scenes and not pictures of a known number of pixels, I feel this is a more realistic comparison between the two cameras.

Conclusion: It appears that the GF1 is somewhere between one to two stops off of what the T1i can do. This does verify what I find in my shooting around the house. For normal shooting, I can use the T1i at ISO 1600 and the GF1 at ISO 800. If I really need the shot, and the exposure is spot on, 3200 and 1600 can be used, respectively. 

This is an area that I hope all of the micro four thirds manufacturers will take pains to address in their next versions. They have a shot at a winning platform. Hopefully low light will trump the race to claim the most pixels.

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 14th, 2010 at 15:11. It is filed under Photography and tagged with "Canon Rebel T1i", "Panasonic Lumix GF1", ISO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.