Neatimage

When we were shooting film, grain was the enemy. Kodak and Fuji struggled to give us fine grain along with high speed, though the two were for the most part inimical. With the advent of digital cameras the struggle changed to reducing noise, and as each successive generation of digital camera has come along we have seen improvements. Some manufacturers have excelled in this area. Canon, for example, has found ways to produce low noise images at high ISOs in their CMOS-based DSRLs that are quite remarkable. The new (Spring 2003)EOS 10Dis simply amazing in this regard. From ISO 100 to 400 is essentially noise free and even ISO 800 and 1600 are quite usable. On the other hand, among other contemporary cameras theKodak DCS 14nhas very disappointing noise characteristics at medium to high ISOs. Nikon and Fuji DSLRs have very good to excellent performance in terms of noise, up to about ISO 400.
But while we rely on manufactures to provide us with better and better in-camera noise reduction ...