Re: Utterly off-topic: digital cameras

Richard Dudley wrote:

(I know uk.r.c has at least one or two keen photographers...)

I'm not one of those, but I am a keen technology watcher :-)

That's also pretty useful.

1. Consider the Fujifilm F30 and the Canon A620, two similarly
priced cameras with good reputations. The F30 is physically
much smaller. I'd naively expect that to show up as some
combination of
- more noise (because less light gets in)
- more gross image distortion (because the lens is smaller)
- fuzzier images (because the lens is worse and more of it
has to be used)
but so far as I can tell it doesn't have either of those
problems.

Jeff Keller at www.dcresource.com points out the F30's above
average levels of purple fringing ( read chromatic aberration ).

Er, is purple fringing really a form of chromatic aberration?
I always assumed, perhaps very wrongly, that it was an artefact
of the sensor design rather than of the optics. If it's an
optical issue, then indeed we seem to have identified a way
in which the F30's small lens hurts it.

If you're restricting yourself to taking indoor shots of cute
babies, this probably won't be an issue. The F30 does seem to
have an extra-special sensor which allows it to get much lower noise
at high ISOs than most. So perhaps the money has been spent on
the electronics rather than the lens.

I'm not proposing to restrict myself to indoor shots
of cute babies. In fact, approximately 0.1% of the
pictures I've taken to date have been indoor shots
of cute babies. Perhaps extrapolation would be unwise,
though. :-)

Is that sufficient reason to think that actually
its optics manage to be just as good as those of the larger
A620 (or, at least, bad in ways that are fully compensated
by a better digital side)? Or are there other Bad Things
that I should be looking out for?

There's not a lot that electronics can do to compensate for lousy
optics. Image stabilisers can help compensate for smaller lenses
to some extent. My experience of owning a Canon camera was that
its purple fringing was too high, this was something not noted in
any review I read before purchase. The lesson learned was to examine
the sample images very carefully !

Right. (The A620 review on dpreview.com specifically says
that there's very little purple fringing. So maybe Canon have
got their act together, or maybe they're just inconsistent.)

The only way I can see that image stabilization could compensate
for smaller lenses is if the sheer amount of light getting in
isn't enough (so that you have to use longer exposures, so that
you care more about motion blur). But surely that is an optical
problem that demonstrably *can* be mitigated digitally, as the
F30 shows?

I'd go for the suck-it-and see approach. Jeff's site has very similar
pics for many varieties of cameras - look at the images yourself and
if you don't see a difference between DSLR pics and compact ones, don't
waste your money.

The trouble is that they're generally images of different subjects
taken in different lighting by different people. Those differences
are always liable to swamp the differences in the cameras, unless
I look at a really big sample.

Of the ones I've looked at, I'd not say that DSLRs
give _much_ better images, but they do tend to have improved clarity
over the run-of-the-mill compact types. I'd guess this is down to the
quality of the lens ( and perhaps its size ) rather than any
differences in electronics other than in sensors.

Seems very plausible. I've seen a nice comparison showing pictures
of the same subject, by the same person, in the same light, using
the same DSLR body and three lenses of very different price (hence,
presumably, very different quality). Very dramatically different
in sharpness of detail.

DSLRs do have
physically larger sensors in general which leads to lower noise.
The most impressive DSLR pics I've seen have featured the Foveon
sensor - its out of your price bracket though and the cameras which
use it have other significant drawbacks ISTM.

Right. I think the D50, right at the bottom end in price,
is the only DSLR I'd consider buying.

I have an old Olympus, not as old as yours, and it has an excellent
lens. My newer Panasonic's lens isn't quite as good ( even though
its from Leica ), it is however so much smaller that I'm not inclined
to use the larger camera any more.

That's a useful data point in favour of pocketability, though
of course it relies on your psychology resembling mine :-).

--
Gareth McCaughan
..sig under construc
.

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