To measure and compare the Panasonic Lumix L1’s noise levels we photographed the standard Gretag Macbeth ColorChecker with it and a number of rivals at each of their ISO settings. The L1 was set to its Standard film mode which employs the camera’s minimum noise reduction value of -2.

The crops are taken from the original images and presented here at 100%. To compare typical noise in skies and dark shadows the crops were taken from patches 3 and 24 respectively.

Up to 400 ISO, the L1’s crops are clean and comparable to the current crop of 10 Megapixel digital SLRs. At 800 ISO, noise levels increase beyond the Nikon D80 and while fractionally worse than the Canon EOS 400D / XTi, they do beat the Sony A100.

At 1600 ISO though, the L1’s noise levels increase significantly, and while similar to the Sony A100, they’re noticeably worse than the Canon and Nikon. As always though, it’s important to also compare real-life high ISO results which can be found on our next page and in our Gallery.

Note: we have compared 100% crops from all cameras here measuring 136×136 pixels. In reality the L1 crops represent a slightly larger area of the image than the other three due to its lower resolution. As such, any artefacts seen on the L1 crops will appear slightly larger than those on the other crops if each image was reproduced to the same size.