Given the Helium 8K’s very impressive noise scores, we wanted to see if it is applying noise reduction before outputting the “RAW” files. The first kind we tested for is the most typical, spatial noise reduction. This is usually a sophisticated form of smoothing areas that appear to have noise, while retaining edges to minimize the loss of sharpness. This approach typically results in a spreading out of the frequency response of the image, and therefore can be detected through careful analysis.
Just as when we tested the RED Dragon for spatial noise reduction, we didn’t see any evidence of this type of smoothing, as there is no correlation between neighbor pixels.

The high frame rate possible with RED’s sensors, including the Helium, mean that they are especially well-suited for noise reduction based on sampling multiple sequential image frames. This technique, called temporal noise reduction (TNR), is most commonly used in video, since there are many successive frames to work with . However, temporal correlations across a time axis are not relevant when analyzing the image quality of a single RAW image, as they do not impact any RAW converters.

Whatever noise reduction system RED employs creating the RAW images from the Helium sensor, its presence means that we aren’t measuring just the RED sensor, so its results aren’t directly comparable to those from camera sensors we have tested from other vendors, whose RAW results come straight from the sensor with no prior noise reduction processing.

Some people do not like to read things before blaming someone :-)

Of course DXOMark carefully avoided mention of known fact that some companies also do noise processing of raw files.