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LEICA M9 High ISO Performance
© 2009 KenRockwell.com. All rights reserved.
Redwood Motel, 2009 M9, 1970 50mm f/2, ISO 1,600, hand-held at 1/6 second at f/2, Nik Dfine 2.0, 6:40AM, 25ºF (-5ºC). Whew! bigger. It helps me keep adding to this site when you use these links to Adorama, Amazon, B&H, Calumet, Ritz, J&R and eBay to get your goodies. Thanks! Ken.
October 2009 LEICA M9 Review More Leica Reviews
Introduction top
Let's see how the LEICA M9 looks at various ISOs.
Just as important as the noise level is how much detail is left. Any camera can apply noise reduction which gets rid of noise, but also gets rid of details and textures.
I'm going to show enlarged crops from small sections of a very large image.
Crop area.
If this image is about 7.5" (18cm) wide on your monitor, the crops below are from 50" (125cm) wide prints.
Technik top
I shot everything on a tripod with a LEICA ELMARIT-M ASPH 21mm f/2.8 lens at about f/8. Ambient temperature was 25ºF (-5ºC). I was bored waiting for the sun to rise at Mono Lake.
I opened each of the M9's DNG files in Adobe Photoshop CS2 on a Mac G5 in Adobe Camera Raw.
I underexposed in the dark (a common problem since I was looking at my LCD, which seems much brighter when viewed in the dark) and had to add +0.5 exposure as I opened the DNGs. This already puts the M9 at a half-stop disadvantage.
The light was flat, so I added Contrast +100, which also emphasizes the noise.
Sharpening was left at its default of 25.
I set Luma and Chroma smoothing both to 0, or no noise reduction, which is less than normal to emphasize any noise.
Results
These are from the very center of each image.
ISO Pull 80 top
ISO 160 top
ISO 200 top
ISO 400 top
ISO 800 top
ISO 1,600 top
ISO 2,000 top
ISO 2,500 top
It's noisy at ISO 2,500, but so is every other camera exploited this way. As mentioned above, I underexposed and had to bring up contrast and exposure, which means this is really the equivalent of at least ISO 3,500.
Notice how it's noisy, but the details are unaltered. Bravo! This is as it should be. THe downfall of most other digital cameras is that they apply too much noise reduction to hide the noise, which also eliminates the details.
We can always apply noise reduction (NR) later in software.
This is how it looks with CS2 ACR Luma Smoothing set to 50 and Chroma Smoothing set to 100.
We always can go overboard.
It is trivial to eliminate noise, if that's all you care about and don't bother to look at detail retention as well.
In this case, I applied no Luma Smoothing, I applied 100 Chroma Smoothing, and then set Nik Dfine 2.0 to its maximum. At large print sizes, most people wouldn't notice this, and this is what many lesser cameras do to test well in consumer publications.
Here is the complete image shot at ISO 2,500 opened in CS2 ACR's default noise settings, still with an additional half-stop of push and 100 contrast and my usual small-size for-the-web sharpening added:
Sure, ISO 2,500 is noisy, but I only use it in the pitch black, and then with f/1.4 lenses which, along with the half-stop push here, means I would have to set a DSLR to ISO 20,000 to give these same results when used with a professional f/2.8 zoom lens.
Adding noise reduction makes this noise go away at normal print sizes:
Thank goodness the LEICA M9 gives us the option to use as little or as much NR as we please. Not bad for ISO 20,000 system equivalent!
In-Camera JPGs top
In-camera JPGs are softer, and thus will show less noise.
I did my darndest to show as much noise as possible here.
Recommendations top
I shoot at ISO 160, which is already super-fast with Leica's fast (f/2.0 - f/0.95) lenses.
ISO 800 looks great, while ISO 1,600 is getting a little noisy.
I save ISO 2,500 for things like trying to shoot star trails hand-held, which just about works with an f/1.4 lens.
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Thanks for reading!
Ken
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