First "no flash needed" compact cameras

[danrok]

Sony is releasing 2 new cameras which are fitted with the Exmor R backlit CMOS sensor, which enables bright looking photos to be taken in low-light.

Currently that sensor is only fitted to their HDR-XR500V and HDR-XR520V high-def video cameras.

Low Lighting? No Problem, Sony Says - Gadgetwise Blog - NYTimes.com

[Daniel ~]

These guys just keep getting better!

[Áedán]

ISO 3200 sensitivity - just have to see how much noise turns up in low light, once people manage to review the thing for real.

[danrok]

Apparently, these cameras will take six shots in "night mode", and make one shot from those six. So, presumably it does some kind of clever noise reduction by comparing the pixels in each shot, and deciding which pixels are noise and what colour they should really be.

[Áedán]

It's the usual trick for averaging noise, on the basis that noise is random. Therefore, putting six pictures together helps to reduce the random noise that would appear in the picture. It also assumes that the objects being photographed don't move too much in the meantime!

It doesn't help with hot pixels either.

[booman]

Yeah, what about movement? do they have a flash for movement or some software capability so moving people are NOT blurry?

[danrok]

I'd guess they'd use the first frame as a master, and re-align the following frames to that.

That would work OK, for small movements, i.e. someone swaying a little while trying to stand still. It wouldn't work if someone was running past, but then you don't necessarily expect or want all movement to be frozen, especially in low-light.

All this is really, is just the shifting of some existing post-editing tricks from the desktop PC to the camera - now that it is possible for a fairly cheap camera to have a fairly powerful processor which isn't too much of a power drain.