Nikon D3200 Noise Reduction

Nikon D3200 Noise Reduction

Being an entry-level model, the Nikon D3200 only offers two noise reduction settings: "On" (default) and "Off", so there's not a lot of flexibility in choosing how you want to make the trade-off between subject detail and noise levels. The Nikon D3200 user manual says it's effective at all ISOs, so we've included crops from the base ISO in the tables below. We've also included crops from raw files with no noise reduction (or sharpening) applied, so you can see that the "Off" setting still applies some noise reduction.

See for yourself how the two noise reduction settings compare across the ISO range under daylight-balanced lighting. Click on any of the crops below to see the corresponding full-sized image.

As you can see, the "On" noise reduction setting does produce images with less noise but at the cost of some detail, as expected. You can also see that the "Off" setting is still applying noise reduction, particularly on chroma (color) noise. As always, for best results we recommend shooting in raw mode and applying noise reduction using your favorite image editor or plugin as you see fit during post processing.