Fujifilm X-E1 Noise Reduction & Raw

Fuji X-E1 Noise Reduction

The Fuji X-E1's five noise reduction settings provide some flexibility in choosing how you want to make the trade-off between subject detail and noise levels in JPEGs. The Fuji X-E1 user manual doesn't say at what ISO noise reduction kicks in, so we've included crops from the base ISO on up in the tables below.

The crops below show the effects of three of the Fuji X-E1's five levels of noise reduction available, under the studio HMI lighting we use to simulate daylight. We've also included RAW crops converted using Adobe Camera Raw with noise reduction and sharpening turned off, to show what the sensor output is like. See for yourself how the noise reduction works under daylight-balanced lighting. Click on any of the crops below to see the corresponding full-sized image.

The Fuji X-E1 starts applying noticeable noise reduction at ISO 800, as we can see some chroma noise in the Adobe Camera Raw conversions that is suppressed in the camera JPEGs. The camera's noise reduction is fairly aggressive in the red channel as can be seen by the loss of definition in our red leaf swatch, though even the converted raw files have less contrast than most Bayer sensor cameras. (Keep in mind though that we don't sharpen these raw conversions to get a better idea of what the sensor is actually outputting.) The difference between the X-E1's noise reduction settings is fairly subtle. All three of the five settings available do a good job at removing most chroma noise, working mostly on luma noise.