Canon Powershot SX200 IS Indoor Crops

Here are sample crops from an artificially-lit scene at each of the Canon Powershot SX200 IS's ISO settings. When available, next to each of these crops, there is a crop from the Fuji Finepix F200 EXR at the same ISO setting. These are both digital cameras with 12 megapixels sensors but the F200 EXR is an ultra-compact with a 5X wide-angle zoom and a more limited feature set.

Images below are all unmodified 100% crops from their respective cameras. ISO sensitivity and White-Balance were set on the cameras, other settings were left at their defaults. Exposure was adjusted to keep the brightness as steady as possible across all ISO settings.

These crops help determine which ISO settings can be acceptably used on these cameras. As noise increases, most cameras compensate with noise reduction which introduces softness. The result is that, while you can partly reduce noise at the expense of details, the maximum acceptable print size gets smaller as ISO is increased. The point at which a print become unacceptably noisy is a matter of personal taste.

Canon Powershot SX200 IS	Fuji Finepix F200 EXR
ISO 80
ISO 100	ISO 100
ISO 200	ISO 200
ISO 400	ISO 400
ISO 800	ISO 800
ISO 1600	ISO 1600

The sequence of ISO settings on the Canon Powershot SX200 IS shows a good but slightly noisy start and mostly increased softness at each step. ISO 200 is the first step where the maximum print size is affected. It would seem Canon is being very aggressive with its noise-reduction here because clear grain never appears, only increased fuzziness.

Competitively, the Fuji shows a clear 2+ stop advantage over the Canon. Even as ISO increases, noise reduction is kept light which gives a clear noise pattern at ISO 1600 but an ISO 800 is still usable for a relatively large print.