Photoclubalpha

have been quite a surprise to me as A900 has been criticized for this.

The A900/850 is fine in good light. I think the criticism is only related to night shots and very poor conditions, at iso 3200-6400. I can use my A900 with confidence at 1600 for professional quality work in poor light.

David

David,
I must have read tons of reviews and threads about A900's noise and jammed image because of the destructive noise reduction it has. My only reference machines were A100 and A700. So A850 was such a surprise to me...much better than my expectation.

Popular Photography's review and latest DxO Lab's scores confirmed the improvement of A850 in terms of noise, at the expense of colour reproduction.

Is that true?

It's likely that the A850 could be shifting the conversion process in the same direction as the A550 - that is, much more Nikon-like in handling noise. This also tends to mean much lower colour saturation at high ISO settings. I've not seen anything convincing yet to say that the A850 is producing a raw file which differs from the A900, and it is unlikely I'll get to try an 850.

David

The measurable differences between 850 and 900 image quality are very low. Whatever diff the DxO may quote is well below statistical error, so it's mere pseudoscience on their part, as usual.

The more relevant data is found in the IR review. They note that small differences in noise properties are there and are quite measurable.

However small that diff is, there are some not so rare conditions under which that diff becomes very apparent. The shadows appear much cleaner with a850 because there are less stray coloured pixel values (hot pixels). It may be a result of gentle filtering rather than different from a900 colour response. Anyway, the a850 may appear much better in the shadows, and it shows the more the greater shadows weight is in the scene captured.

David Kilpatrick wrote:I... This also tends to mean much lower colour saturation at high ISO settings. ...
David

My A100 shows significant loss in color saturation at ISO 1600. And it still looks noisy. (Wondering how that is supposed to help...)

Having bee indulged usng a850 I cannot be happier...
I kept the ISO to 160/320 unless absolutely necessary. The ISO is indeed slightly better than EOS 5D far below that of D700/D3/D3s. I wish with improved firmware and software the performance will be similar to that of 5D II / D3x