So, if you see a down triangle on one of Bill's charts, the baked-in NR is "obvious".
Obvious in the context of technical measurebating or in actual real world images? I guess I'll go on being blissfully ignorant of the low ISO NR forced on me by Canon in an attempt to cover up their inferior sensor technology.
Call it whatever you want, but some cameras are baking material amounts of NR into RAW files that is not user-controllable. It is impossible to apply NR without a loss of detail, and without an uncooked RAW from the same camera, it's not something you can easily quantify. If it's not something that bothers you for your usage, then you don't need to worry about it. Personally, I prefer having as much control as possible over my RAW files for the same reasons I don't want lens corrections, sharpening, or vignetting correction baked into my RAWs. The baked-in NR is also why, for example, the R5 is not ISO invariant until after the ISO values that Canon is adding NR.
Some people will not care if their RAWs have baked-in NR, but it's hard to argue that it wouldn't be better to have a menu option and let the user decide. If there is baked-in NR, it also makes it that much more difficult to objectively compare to other bodies when making a purchase decision or similar. Bill also estimates that the NR in the R5 is making it look about 2/3 stop better than it is. Also, baked-in NR tends to be something that camera manufacturers actively try to hide, it is not viewed as a 'feature' - that should tell you something
Irrelevant. What matters is results. If a camera maintains a high level of accutance with lower noise, it is smart design.
In case you haven't noticed, computational imaging is making meaningful improvements. This is just another example.
Which is precisely the point. It is possible to get better results with the highly computational intensive denoising algorithms implemented in raw conversion software.
It's really a matter of good enough. Some people are happy with in camera raw NR, others prefer to tap fully into the potential of the sensor.
My personal preference is for autonomy and I prefer to do things myself but I fully understand that others prefer to trust their camera to do it for them. I don't consider this to be a huge problem and I am glad to see that Canon finally found a way to provide their users with decent dynamic range since the R6/R5/R3 generation. The 5D mkIV was starting to show encouraging signs already.
Cheers,
Bernard
Feb 28, 2024 at 12:57 AM
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