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Noise Test: Panasonic GH2 with Driftwood's 176mb GOP1
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  • @LPowell: Exactly! To me it seems that the 160 based ISOs have gone from the best to the worst settings. The odd part is that I see little difference between 160 and 200 and 640 and 800, but 320 and 1250 looks awful, having noticeably more noise.
  • I find the GH2's ISO160 minimum to be one of the most annoying little things about the camera. I understand that it resulted from Panasonic's decision to correct the inaccurate ISO calibration of the GH1, whose ISO settings are about 1/2-stop underrated across its range (e.g. GH1 ISO100 = GH2 ISO140). However, the absence of ISO100 on the GH2 makes it awkward to match minimum-ISO exposure with other cameras. Often I'll resort to using ISO200 across the board, if only to simplify things.

    Something is definitely suspicious about the noise jump from ISO250 to ISO320 in the video above. I notice a similar increase in noise from ISO1000 to ISO1250. Consumer cameras often use digital scaling to simulate the 1/3-stop increments between the standard full-stop settings. From this video it appears that some of the 2/3-stop settings may be digitally downscaled from the next higher full-stop setting, e.g ISO320 = downscaled ISO400 exposure.
  • Devastating! Seriously though, I'm looking at improving a few things this week, and noise is one of the issues.