OK, if there’s any of you that read my post title and started humming the rare and aging God Lives Underwater track, you just got infinite bonus points with me. For the rest of you, let’s talk about what’s probably the hottest topic in digital cameras: noise.

Just to be thorough, let’s recap the basics. “Noise” is the digital equivalent of “grain” from the film days. Noise increases proportionally to ISO. Noise comes in two basic flavors: luminance and chroma. Luminance is the gritty grain, chroma is the weird color-swirling seen in shadows, most often reds and purpley-blues.

Now, my personal stance is that noise is very much an over-emphasized element of overall camera IQ (which stands for “image quality” in this case). And, this being the web, you can of course find thousands upon thousands of opinions as to what causes noise, what effects noise, whether noise is good or bad, whether the noise of something like an Olympus digital camera is unacceptably worse than the noise of a full-frame Canon digital SLR camera, etc…

And so, for those of you so technically inclined, I’m going to provide a link to the most scientifically, mathematically thorough examination of camera noise, what causes it, how it works, the NEF compression used in Nikon digital SLR cameras, 12-bit vs 14-bit pipelines, and more that you could ever hope for. It’s a long and (at least for someone who never finished calculus, like me) often arduous read. But, if you’re serious about understanding the science behind your equipment in order to milk the most out of it, you owe it to yourself to at least try and slug through it.

http://theory.uchicago.edu/~ejm/pix/20d/tests/noise/index.html