u/GasparVonToll

I recently switched from Canon to Sony, and have been wondering why the high ISO performance is so bad. Like miles off my old Canon RP. So far I have shrugged it off as I rarely push the ISO far. This has been happening since the first time I picked up the camera. It is like the camera tries to edit the edit the underexposed areas to be lighter and introduced a lot of grain. I have tried pretty much everything with the in-camera settings, like D-range optimizer, metering modes and noise reduction but to no awail.

Today I tried to underexpose a part of a landscape, after which I took few portraits having the camera sideways and realized that the sensor always makes the bottom side of the image really grainy.

Here is a test: an image of a chair at my hotel room with the camera sideways to the right and to the left. Third image is with my old Canon RP with exactly the same settings. Both cameras had 28mm prime lenses.

Settings used for all images: 28mm - f/4.5 - 1/320 - ISO 6400, underexposed by around two stops.

It gets way worse at 12800 and is sometimes visible even from ISO 400 and up. It is barely visible on properly exposed and overexposed areas, but always when the area is underexposed. I have three lenses and the problem persists with all of them. I also updated the firmware.

It seems that the sensor is cooked, right?

Also added a bonus pic, taken at ISO 1000 in a really dark room in an exhibition. Seems like even though the grain is usually limited to the bottom side, sometimes it’s just full-on whole picture. This was taken on the first day owning the camera - I just thought that I messed up the settings somehow.