HS10 vs D300 – Part 4 – Indoor Details at 1600 ISO

To close this short comparison series, I thought it might be instructive to compare the D300 against the HS10 at 1600 ISO indoors. The HS10 has the BSI CMOS chip from Sony, which is touted as being excellent at high ISO. But let’s see how close it gets to the benchmark of the D300.

I have two images in this comparison. The methodology is to show each image followed the same image with embedded crops to isolate certain details at 100%.

First, I catch my son for a moment while he is ringing up a new lens pen for me. I bought it for this comparison to make sure that the lenses were all clean. He was a bit closer for the D300 shot, which does give it a slight advantage, but there is diddly I can do about that now. Still, same lighting, same distance within a small variance, several shots each and the sharpest taken.

HS10

D300

Observations

• No contest on noise and smoothness of jacket. But that was expected.
• Strange blue channel issue caused by WB adjustment. Seems to show up in the hair crop.
• Nothing unexpected here.

Then I shot a rather cool display for a camera snorkel mask … neat idea. I liked the texture of the dummy head and the mask. Always enjoy trying to capture the smooth shiny look of plastic.

HS10

D300

Observations

• Again, nothing unexpected.

   

I suppose that this functions as a reminder of why people buy dSLRs over bridge cams. While these HS10 images are perfectly acceptable for snap shot albums etc, you cannot raise ISO this high and retain fine details. And that matters sometimes.