Sony Alpha A550 ISO Performance - Indoor Low Light

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I received a few requests from fler alpha users to post the sample photos of the Sony Alpha a550 ISO performance is low light situation.

In my previous post here I post sample photos of the Sony Alpha a550 ISO performance in a place where light is abundant and therefore it is kinda difficult to gauge how well does the new Exmor Cmos sensor will perform if light is not as abundant, after all higher ISO number is all about balancing the lack of light in your enviroment rite?

Click on the above image to see the larger version.

Initially I wanna put all 7 images separately but i thought that would defeat the purpose and arranging them side by side would actually makes the comparison easier.

There is 7 choices of ISO level in the Sony Alpha a550, it starts from ISO200, ISO 400, ISO800, ISO1600, ISO3200, ISO6400 and ISO12800. Thats how the images are arrange, the lower you go, the higher the ISO gets.

Before we go any further I would like to say that i m not much of a pixel peeper myself, I believes that when an ordinary person looks at an image, he do not zoom into certain part of the image to look at how are the pixels constructions for that particular image.

When a regular normal person look at an image ... we just see the image as a whole and what kinda story / feelings we can gain from the whole image itself.

Ok back tot he above images, from what i noticed all images from ISO1600 and below is perfectly fine. The presents of noise in the image is close to none, which also means that if you owns a Sony Alpha a550 you could use up to ISO1600 anytime without hesitation! the only questions will be, do you need ISO1600 in the enviroment you are currently in.

Grains/noise started showing up @ ISO3200, just a little its probably not even noticeable if I didnt tell you about it. To a photographer like me, the ISO3200 photos is still very acceptable and i would rather bump up to ISO3200 (70%) of the time rather than grab the big ass flash guns from my bag and rely on it for lights.

@ISO6400 its still bearable, if i do not own any f58/f42 flash guns I would gladly switch to ISO6400 and get the photos that i want.

@ISO12800 ... seriously ... do all dslr cameras do this? the last ISO is always almost un-usable. Not unless you wanna turn your object from a still photos to oil painting like image! would like to call this phenomenon the Oil painting ISO.

This exist in most of the DSLRs i get my hands on, try this out yourself! Try this yourself, borrow your friend's dslr and switch it to the highest ISO and take a photo in low light condition (indoor) and take a look at the image you just captured .... it seriously looked like an oil painting!

In a nutshell, I think the Sony Alpha A550 ISO performance is pretty awesome. I been using the Sony Alpha a200 and anything higher than ISO800 will result in getting oil painting images. Same goes to a buddy of mine whois using the D80 "photos started to show grainy effect @ISO1000 and above" he said.

So there you have it, Sony Alpha a550 sub RM3k body that gives you great images @ higher ISO range! Really a bang for your bucks!