a7r iii Overly noisy pictures?

[Niccolo T]

Hi Everyone, 

I recently bought a A7R III and I have been testing it for a month, but I am worried when it comes to low light shooting that I may be getting too much noise and colour noise?

When there is plenty of light I don't have any problems, but I have read online on the reviews that this camera should be performing very well in low light as well. 

Some samples as follows (note that most have been acquired in "Auto" settings)

Raw sample files are downloadable in this Shared folder.

Overall in these shots the environmental light was low, but not that low! Most were artificial lights like in  this case in witch you can see they are illuminating completely the subject and yet I get high colour noise and noise.

After I have seen these shots I started doing some manual in low light, and the results can be better, but they are of course more complicated to shoot and I don't get why the "AUTO" settings always select high ISO (in my auto test the camera always select 12.800).

Is my camera faulty?  Either the "Auto" shoot or the noise level?

NT

 

[gcharma]

I thought I was running into the same problem, but I think it was (in my case) partially settings, and partially setting my expectations appropriately (I'm on an A7R IV).

On the settings side, the thing that worked for me was to set the Auto ISO range from 100-3200. In this way, I'm prevented from a situation where the camera boosts the ISO to compensate for poor choices in other settings on my part (I mostly shoot manual so this happens a lot, especially when I move from outdoors to indoors for example). The other setting I changed was the ISO Range Limit, and here I set the range I feel is even possibly usable - for me this was 50-16000. Test shots I've taken above 16000 ISO are beyond what I would ever even try to salvage.

So now, when I'm in Auto the camera won't go beyond what I feel is fine for most shots (3200 ISO), and if I can't adjust aperture or SS to compensate for that limit I can just dial up the ISO to a point where the exposure is correct. This setup seems like it saves me from myself, at least most of the time.  ;)

The other part about setting expectations, I mean... these aren't an A7S-series camera. Low-light performance is good, especially amongst competitors, but it's not magic and posterization/colour shift occurs at points that don't put these cameras in a completely different league from other top-shelf sensors. It's a trade off for pixel density, and one I'm happy to make.

Good luck!