Nikon D3 High ISO Noise Reduction

As noted elsewhere in this review, the Nikon D3 delivers a noticeable advance in high-ISO image quality over all other Nikons. Its different noise-reduction settings also allow you quite a bit of flexibility in choosing how you want to make the trade-off between subject detail and noise levels. It's not clear that the "off" setting truly eliminates the noise processing altogether, but it is true that it leaves a lot of fine/subtle subject detail there for you to work with. The combination of shooting with NR turned off and using a good noise-filtering program after the fact can produce very clean images with lots of fine detail in them. (And of course, the D3's NEF files have no noise-reduction processing applied to them at all, adhering to the true philosophy of RAW shooting.)

See for yourself how the noise reduction works under both daylight and tungsten-balanced lighting. Click on any of the crops below to see the corresponding full-sized image. Note that noise levels are so low, that the D3 only starts to apply high ISO NR at ISO 2,000 and above. Also note that "Off" isn't truly off for ISOs above 6,400 as the D3 still does some minimal NR at those very high ISOs when set to "Off".

High ISO Noise Reduction Comparison Simulated Daylight
	Off	Low	Normal	High
I S O 3 2 0 0
	Off	Low	Normal	High
I S O 6 4 0 0
	Off	Low	Normal	High
I S O 1 2 8 0 0
	Off	Low	Normal	High
I S O 2 5 6 0 0

The above crops show the effects of the 4 levels of high ISO noise reduction, under the HMI lighting we use to simulate standard daylight. Note that some minimal NR is still performed at ISO 6,400 and above when High ISO NR set to "Off".

High ISO Noise Reduction Comparison Incandescent Light
	Off	Low	Normal	High
I S O 3 2 0 0
I S O 6 4 0 0
I S O 1 2 8 0 0
I S O 2 5 6 0 0

The above crops show the effects of the 4 levels of high ISO noise reduction the D3 offers, under difficult household incandescent lighting. (Image noise is much more of an issue under tungsten lighting, because the strong yellow cast requires the blue channel to be boosted considerably to achieve proper white balance. That boost increases noise along with the image data, so noise levels will generally be higher under tungsten lighting than daylight.)