Fujifilm X-T1 High ISO NR

Fuji X-T1 Noise Reduction

The Fuji X-T1'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-T1 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 the default and lowest of the Fuji X-T1'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 minimized and sharpening disabled to show what the sensor output is like. (Please be aware that Adobe Camera Raw still applies noise reduction to the X-T1's RAW images even with the noise reduction sliders turned all the way down.) 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-T1 starts applying noise reduction at ISO 200, as we can see slight differences in luma noise between the default and lowest setting. 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 so perhaps it has a lot to do with the more complex demosaicing required. (As previously mentioned, though, please be aware that Adobe Camera Raw still applies noise reduction to the X-T1's RAW images even with NR sliders turned all the way down.) Both the default and lowest available settings do a good job at removing most chroma noise, with differences mainly in luma noise.