Learn aboutLow light performance

Its a constant struggle in photography to get enough light. Have you ever noticed that basically whenever you're indoors, or outside without a lot of sun, your camera's flash fires? Thats because your camera knows it doesn't have enough light to capture an image without blur. What if you want a natural light shot? To get more light, have a few options:

• Use a wider aperture lens, these are usually heavy, expensive, and often don't have zoom
• Use a lower shutter speed, this will cause blurring if you go too slow, especially if your subject is moving, or you're not using a tripod.
• Increase the ISO setting on your camera. When you increase from say 100 ISO to 400 ISO, you get 4x as much light allowing you to quadruple your shutter speed (say from 1/15s to 1/60s) which might be enough to avoid blur. However, increasing the ISO on your camera usually comes with the tradeoff of lower image quality, specifically you'll see noise in your images, visible as grain and color splotches.

So, for many people, the answer is to buy a DSLR with great low light performance. Turn off your flash, bump up the ISO, and take advantage of natural light to get beautiful photographs. Snapsort uses measurements from DxOMark to quantify how high you can push the ISO on a given camera before the image quality starts to degrade.

Snapsort uses measurements from DxOMark for low light performance. These measurements are only available for cameras that shoot RAW which includes all DSLRs and a few high-end point and shoots.

High ISO Example

The following photo shows a great shot taken at ISO 6400, f/6.3, 200mm, 1/250s. If the photographer had stuck with say ISO 100, their image would have been blurry. Instead of getting 1/250s they would have gotten 1/4s, which at any focal length (let alone 200mm) would be blurry from camera-shake.

If you look at the 100% crop of the original image you can see two types of noise: luminance (the grainy dots) and chroma (the color anomalies).

When to use a high ISO

If you don't have to use a high ISO value, don't! 100 ISO (or 200 ISO) will always get you the best image quality. But, if there isn't enough light to get the shutter speed you need, then bump up that ISO. High ISO settings are often used by sports photographers who need fast shutter speeds to catch fast action, by wedding photographers shooting in dark churches, but photojournalists who don't want to be encumbered by external flashes, and want to use natural light for their images.

Comparing Low Light ISO Scores

Lets compare the Nikon D700 gets a score of 2,303 ISO and the the Canon T2i (a much cheaper camera) gets a score of 784 ISO. How do these two compare?

Firstly, this means that according to the DxOMark benchmarks the D700 shoots great quality images up to 2,303 ISO, and the T2i shoots great quality images up to 748 ISO.

The difference can be expressed in f-stops, using this equation: Log2(2303/784) = 1.6 f-stops. This tells you that the D700 can get 1.6 f-stops more light than the T2i with the same image quality. For example, imagine you were shooting a subject a 800 ISO and 1/15s on the T2i, you could shoot it at approx 2,400 ISO on the D700 at 1/40s and get the same image quality, but likely get a much sharper image due to the faster shutter.

Digital Cameras with Great Image Quality at High ISO

Compact Cameras

The following compact cameras the best image quality at high ISO we've seen, keep in mind that only a few compact cameras are measured.

Mirrorless Interchangeable-lens Cameras

The following mirrorless interchangable lens cameras have the best image quality at high ISO we've seen.

Entry Level DSLRs

The following entry level SLRs have the best image quality at high ISO.

Pro DSLRs

The following Pro SLRs have the best image quality at high ISO.

Related links

• DxOMark's website
• Sports & action photography: low-light ISO at DxoMark
• Learn about dynamic range
• Learn about overall sensor image quality
• Learn about color-depth image quality

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