Sony Alpha 3000 review – Noise, resolution and sensitivity
Images: At ISO 400 the images are very clear and a lot of fine detail is resolved
Interestingly, Sony claims that the sensor in the Alpha 3000 has the same adaptive noise-reduction features as the sensor in its full-frame SLT model, the Alpha 99. The Alpha 3000 has a huge sensitivity range of ISO 100-16,000. At the lowest sensitivity of ISO 100, noise is only slightly visible at 100% and a touch more prominent in shadow areas. At ISO 800, JPEGs have obvious noise when viewed at 100%, although it would be unnoticeable on a small print or web image. For clean images, sensitivities between ISO 100 and ISO 800 are comfortable to use without any issues. It isn’t until ISO 3200 that luminance noise becomes noticeable and in-camera noise reduction begins to take much of the finer detail from the image. In comparison to other mirrorless cameras, this is a very good performance.
Overall, colour noise is excellently controlled. Only from ISO 6400 and upwards does a slight haze of colour noise become visible, mostly in shadow areas.
These images show 72ppi (100% on a computer screen) sections of images of a resolution chart, captured using the 18-55mm lens set to 35mm and f/8 . We show the section of the resolution chart where the camera starts to fail to reproduce the lines separately. The higher the number visible in these images, the better the camera’s detail resolution is at the specified sensitivity setting.
