Olympus E-PL1 High ISO RAW

Olympus E-PL1 High ISO RAW Image Quality

We've recently started looking at RAW files converted with dcraw, an excellent freeware raw converter. dcraw usually offers timely support for the latest cameras, but more importantly, it does not apply any noise-reduction, sharpening or other corrections such as geometric distortion correction to the output files. (We found that Adobe Camera Raw still applies some limited noise-reduction when its NR settings are set to zero, and it also applies other corrections depending on the make and model of the camera). There will always be differences between RAW converters, in terms of the sort of demosaicing algorithms they use (the processes by which they convert the separate Red, Green, and Blue data sets to an array of full-color RGB pixels), but dcraw seems to use a fairly generic algorithm that delivers good sharpness with relatively few artifacts, and can be counted on to not apply any noise reduction if you don't want it to.

Below are crops from Olympus E-PL1 high ISO RAW files compared to RAW files from other Micro Four-Thirds models: the Olympus E-P1, the new Olympus E-P2 and the Panasonic GF1. All were converted with dcraw with no noise reduction or sharpening.

To our eyes, the newer Olympus E-PL1 and E-PL2 have slightly better noise performance compared to the E-P1, though the E-P1 does a little better with the red fabric. Color response is a bit different though. The Olympus models appear to have a slight edge over the Panasonic GF1 in terms of high ISO noise. Click on the crops above to load the full size images.