The Unexpected GFX100S Perk: Low Light Performance.

The Unexpected GFX Perk: Low Light Performance.

I am here today to ramble about an unexpected GFX perk. Especially in 100MP form then allied with a fast lens. What I expected:

Crazy blown-out backgrounds.
Subject isolation.
Great detail.
Had heard it has great colors.
- Which makes little sense to me since Sony made the sensor…. And the sensor of the Hasselblad X2D which gets even bigger raves about its color. So, down to the software then? Or is Sony somehow kitting sensors they sell to others differently than their own, far better than they used to be, sensors.

The surprise perk?

Low light performance.

Yes, the sensor is bigger…. but not that much bigger. Plus with so many MP my thinking was that low light was not the draw. Based on Sony’s own S line of bodies I associated great low light performance with low MP count. This equals larger pixels or so I was told. I am not noticing this for the first time now. I picked up on it in an early routine test. Taking night snaps with little care and terrible technique on the way home from chorus rehearsal. Arms length on the fly flailing, high shutter speeds, and even higher ISOs. Fun, but has required the images be hit with the Lightroom AI Denoise stick to make them presentable for public consumption. Otherwise they would be a grain and noise filled disaster. But on the first test (posted here) this happened.

On any other camera I own under those same conditions the blacks would have been a noise filled odd colored mess. So what gives? Those were JPEGs and not RAW files so I thought it may be the denoise FUJIFILM baked into its JPEG files, maybe?

So to either confirm or debunk this I decided to take a look at both JPEG files and RAW files under low light conditions. The test case. A Noir at the Bar reading event I was invited to by Kent D. Corley.

GFX - Noir At The Bar - Yonder Bar — Also picked up one of his photo books I had ordered yesterday.

Pics I took as we caught up before the event with the TTArtisan 90mm f/1.25.

Before I continue here the sensor already impressed me when reviewing the RAW files later that night. This room was dimly lit and even the colors remained true at 4 digit ISO levels. I first edited the JPEGS, under the assumption that some denoise magic was at play, and then I edited the RAW files. The JPEG files were good, but the RAW files were even better. While both were clean the RAW flies allowed me to claw back much more detail with no penalty. Especially with the pics in the bar that follow. Where the JPEG files were clean due to the low light I underexposed the scene for almost a reverse vignette. The subject could be seen, but they were surrounded by black representing the underexposed background. When trying to raise the shadows and/or the exposure the background would fall apart. Not so with the RAW files I edited for the photos that follow. For these I switched to the Voigtlander 40mm f/1.2 (Effectively 31.6mm in full frame parlance.) since we were sat in the front row. In what is becoming a common theme I did not use the one native GF AF lens I had the entire evening.