Samsung NX300 Noise reduction, excessive? Questions from a recent Samsung convert.

Name
Tillman Bennett
Hello all,

After years of not paying much attention to Samsung and using Sony stuff, I got fed up with Sony leaving me in the cold every time they came out with something bigger and better and only offering $400+ primes in the focal length I wanted. I started out using a Panasonic GF1 years ago, it came bundled with the 20mm f1.7 which became my favorite lens, and ever since I've been longing for something similar in an APS camera with the same size and field of view. I looked at everything out there it seemed like and eventually realized that Samsung had the excellent 30mm F2.0 pancake and the NX300 was well within my budget and it had the size and features I was after.

Now after playing around with it for a while but not doing any real formal tests since my computer has been on the fritz, it looks like the noise reduction is somewhat heavy handed on the JPEG's at fairly low ISO, say between 640 and 1600 ISO. Has anyone else noticed this? I see the option in the menu to vary the NR but that says it applies to ISO 6400 and up. Like I said, I haven't had a chance to do much formal testing, but I was curious if anyone else had or at least had noticed if this seemed to be the case? I'm shooting Raw+jpeg just to be on the safe side but those 20mp files really add up in a hurry, so for more casual shooting I'd rather just shoot jpeg.

Thanks!

Tillman
 
I had a chance to take a look at a couple shots I took in bright overcast at 200 ISO, the jpeg had some apparent noise reduction which was odd because it really wasn't necessary, but the raw version was quite clear. I think I'll shoot a lo
Are the developed RAWs any better? By developed I mean you have applied your own sharpening and noise reduction.

Yes the developed RAWs look much better than the OOC jpegs, of course this isn't unique to this camera necessarily. The camera seems to have a real issue with showing any sort of grain, it wants to smear over all that. I did dial the sharpness down and that seems to make the jpegs look much more natural. The default with this camera and many others seems to be to apply the sharpening quite heavily and I think that can contribute to the "Smeared" look.
 
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