Noise problem solved

[keiffer]

http://community.webshots.com/user/keiffer953 I found the problem, well atleast mine and probably others. It's OVER SATURATION! The noise or artifacts that was talked about in another thread is actually cause by over saturation. If you take a look at the 2 pics I posted you'll see what I'm talking about.

[b.j.c]

Yes, I think saturation is a factor in the amount of noise that we get in images. However, your second picture is very desaturated - more so than I would want any of my images to look.

My FZ20 saturates things pretty nicely, and while you can get rid of some noise by turning saturation down, the pictures then do not look natural. I tried shooting with low saturation, and then bumping it up on my PC, but that leads to more noise than shooting with normal saturation.

[keiffer]

Ok so what settings are you using, and I agree I too don't like desaturating that much but it solved the problem. Give me some more options if you know any. Thanks

[b.j.c]

I just put the camera in program mode and turned saturation to low. All other settings were normal (I did do some tests turning down sharpness and contrast too). I haven't investigated it much further than that, but am now sticking to 80/100 ISO whenever possible, 200 if I need it, and 400 only in desperation. In the end I don't find noise to be too much of a problem, and there are always programs like NeatImage (http://www.neatimage.com/index.html?37)

[keiffer]

Can you post some pics of your test? I never used ISO 400 or 200 for that matter, Just curious to see your results.