17) ISO Performance at low ISOs (ISO 100-800)
Some Technical Info:
- White Balance: Custom
- Tested with: Sony 70-200mm f/4 OSS
- Aperture: f/5.6
- Manual Focus
- DRO: Off
- Long exposure NR: Off
- High ISO HR: Off
- Image Format: Uncompressed RAW
- Processing Engine: RawDigger 1.2.1, RAW to TIFF
- Export: TIFF Cropped and Exported in Lightroom CC, sRGB JPEG Quality 80
- EXIF information is preserved in the images
Let’s take a look at how the Sony A7R II performs at low ISOs. Here are some 100% crops at ISO 100, 200, 400 and 800:
As expected, images look very clean and low ISOs. At ISO 800 we can see a bit of noise in the shadows, but it is not distracting by any means.
18) High ISO Performance (ISO 1600-25600)
Let’s see what happens when ISO is boosted to much higher levels:
ISO 1600 adds quite a bit more noise and this time we are starting to see noise impacting other areas of the image. At ISO 3200 we start to see chroma noise, but the colors and the details look good and perfectly usable once downsampled, or cleaned up with noise reduction software.
As ISO is pushed higher than 3200, we see far more noise all over the image. Both chroma and luminance noise are very noticeable at ISO 6400. At ISO 12800, we see loss of detail and the noise levels are already too high to make the image usable.
Although ISO 25600 falls within the range of the native ISO on the A7R II, you can clearly see that it looks quite bad and completely unusable. Even downsampling such an image and running noise reduction would do little to help. And ISO 51200 is far worse in comparison, with most details getting mushy.
Lastly, I really don’t see the point of providing ISO 102400, since it looks like garbage.
So what can we say about the noise performance of the A7R II? It is certainly hard to say how good or bad the performance is without direct comparisons to other cameras, so let’s see how it fares against other high-resolution cameras. Select the next page below.