Nikon D850 High ISO Sample Images

The Nikon D850 has an ISO range of 32 to 102,400.

Of that, the native ISO range is 64 to 25,600. That’s the natural range of the sensor hardware.

Beyond that, the extended ISO range goes down to ISO 32 and up to ISO 102,400. That’s where software takes over to amplify the signal. And, in general, image quality can drop off quite markedly in the extended ISO range. Especially image noise, dynamic range, and color fidelity. These extended ISO ranges can be useful to get the shot in difficult lighting conditions, but mostly in a last-resort kind of way.

The purpose of this post

Those specs are all well and good, but what does that mean in real-world visual terms?

That’s where this post aims to help. Because one camera’s image output at ISO 6400 is rarely the same as another’s.

And every photographer has their own tastes and preferences. What one photographer might consider good image quality might not be suitable for what another photographer wants.

That’s why I’m providing some real-world images that I’ve taken with the Nikon D850, to give some real examples that you can use to make your own decisions.

But to avoid any misunderstandings, it’s also worth noting what I’m not trying to do:

• I’m not trying to do is show heavily edited images. To the contrary, these are generally quite lightly edited, because I want it to be useful for judging the image files that you can expect to get out of the camera, not how they can be enhanced with the latest filters and plugins. I might apply more editing to images intended for other uses, but that’s not the objective here.
• These are focused on real-world shooting, not lab tests. There are other places you can find lab data. What I’m focusing on here is a visual sense of what you can expect if you were to pick up the camera and take it shooting. The type of thing that numbers can’t give you.
• And these are not intended to be my favorite or best or even particularly notable photographs. I save those for elsewhere. Instead, I’m just trying to give a sense of what you can expect out of this camera with different kinds of lighting and detail and scenes. I often test cameras at the same locations and with similar scenes so that there’s something of a baseline for comparison.

I hope you find it helpful! And if you have any questions, let me know in the comments and I’ll get back to you!

Nikon D850 High ISO Sample photos

So here’s a selection of photos I’ve taken at ISO 3200 and above on the Nikon D850.

The images you’re seeing here were originally shot in RAW. I have lightly processed them in Lightroom Classic, but I haven’t applied any extra image noise reduction to them. Under normal circumstances, for many of these I’d run them through DxO PureRAW or use Lightroom Classic’s built-in enhance tool to reduce the image noise. But I haven’t applied those to these particular images.

Another thing worth noting is that the versions you see here are rendered directly from the RAW files. What I mean by that is that, by default, the D850 applies noise reduction in-camera. That then affects the JPG previews that are embedded with the RAW file, but it doesn’t affect the underlying RAW image data. For these, I have essentially bypassed those JPG previews that were processed by the camera.

I’ve tried to include a variety of tones, colors, and scenes.

You can click on each image for a full-size version for a closer look.