I am using a Sony DSC-H50 Camera. I have had it for about 3-4 years. During the day the camera seems to do amazingly well and I am very happy with it. I am however struggling with lower light settings, such as inside, the garage, and low light outdoor shots. For the sake of comparison I will sometime switch between the auto setting, and manually setting the camera for the shots. I am really trying to learn to use this camera, and get a good grasp on manual settings, and I feel for the most part, I am pretty good with the camera. Both the auto and manual settings still have too much noise for my liking. After shooting lower light photos I review them on my computer, and sometimes do some minor photo enhancements, but the level of noise is driving me nuts! It seems that no matter what I do, I am still getting a lot of noise. Is the noise more likely from my camera, not being that good, or is it more user error? For instance here is a couple pictures I took yesterday, lower light garage setting. Sunny outside, no lights on in the garage. I already tried to enhance the photos, but they still look crappy.

I use Photoscape and Photo Pos Pro for editing. I do reduce the noise in these programs as well.






Here are the camera settings.
First picture: f/3.2, 1/15sec, ISO-400, 16mm
Second picture: f/2.8, 1/10sec, ISO-400, 6mm
Third picture: f/2.7, 1/13sec, auto, 5mm
Fourth picture: f/2.7, 1/25sec, ISO-400, 5mm

Thanks for your help!

 

Upgrade to a Fuji. I mean 4 years on a point and shoot is fairly long in the tooth.

The F200EXR is pretty incredible when it comes to high iso picture quality.

 

The noise you see is simply a result of your camera increasing the "gain" of the sensor in order to get a proper exposure in the lower light levels. Point and shoot cameras, along with super zooms, have very small sensors which are very suceptible to noise as the "gain" is increased.

There are several ways around this:

1) Buy a tripod, shoot at the lowest ISO possible, using longer exposures
2) Use noise reduction software at the expense of resolution and detail
3) Buy a camera with a larger sensor, such as a DSLR or EVIL (EVIL = electronic viewfinder interchangable lens) such as micro 4/3's cameras.

There is nothing really you can do to improve your camera's ISO performance, short of overexposing, then sliding it back in post (a common way of reducing noise).

 

Thank you both for your advice. I was under the same impression that I am limited by my equipment.