Nikon D5300 High ISO NR

Nikon D5300 High ISO Noise Reduction

The Nikon D5300's four noise-reduction settings ("High, "Normal", "Low" and "Off") provide good flexibility in choosing how you want to make the trade-off between subject detail and noise levels. The Nikon D5300 user manual doesn't say when High ISO NR kicks in, so we've included crops from the base ISO on up in the tables below. The manual does however say that the "Off" still applies noise reduction "as required", though at a lower strength than the "Low" setting.

See for yourself how the Nikon D5300's "Normal" and "Off" High ISO NR settings compare to RAW without noise reduction under daylight-balanced lighting. (Note that these RAW images have no sharpening applied, so they look softer than camera JPEGs at low ISOs.) Click on any of the crops below to see the corresponding full-sized image.

The Nikon D5300's "Normal" High ISO NR setting provides a good tradeoff between noise and detail at lower ISOs to our eye, but we'd probably shoot with lower settings at higher ISOs and reduce noise ourselves in post-processing (or just shoot RAW). At higher ISOs, we can see the "Off" setting still performs noise reduction, but leaves much more chroma noise which helps with better definition in our red-leaf swatch. Nikons usually perform very well with that difficult subject, but the D5300's more effective default chroma noise reduction does cause stronger blurring in the red-leaf swatch than what we're used to seeing from Nikon. Still, we're sure many target users will appreciate the reduced chroma noise in their high ISO JPEGs.