Zoom-Zoom

Posted by: tanstaafl.

Zoom-Zoom - 30/04/2007 03:27

I have been playing a bit with my new camera, a Panasonic DMC-FZ50, and while I haven't yet taken any pictures of any quality, the capabilities of the camera are pretty impressive.

Attached is a montage showing four full-frame pictures demonstrating the total possible zoom range of this camera. These pictures are exactly as taken by the camera, except that I resized them to 640x480 to keep the file size reasonable. In other words, they weren't photoshopped or anything like that.

A few things I have found to be interesting about the camera... the image in the viewfinder is light-amplified, so that in very dim light I can see detail not visible to the naked eye. The image stabilization really works -- I can get acceptable hand-held pictures (bracing my elbows against my chest) with one second long exposures, and with a bit of luck even longer than that. (Acceptable = viewable on my computer screen without too much blurriness; I'm not claiming they are razor sharp suitable for printing poster size! )

All in all, a nice toy.

tanstaafl.

Edit: Ooops... I see I messed up the montage -- two of the pictures are the same when one of them was supposed to be an intermediate zoom shot. There... fixed.

db
Posted by: pedrohoon

Re: Zoom-Zoom - 30/04/2007 04:53

Congratulations on the purchase!

I have the FZ10, which overall I am very pleased with, particularly for photos of birds and wildlife - the zoom with Image Stabilisation is great isn't it! (image attached).

The main issue I have is noise at higher ISOs - has this been addressed with the FZ50?

The build quality is very good and the feel of the controls such as the manual focus ring is very smooth.
Posted by: pedrohoon

Re: Zoom-Zoom - 30/04/2007 05:01

I also bought a Lowepro TLZ mini bag which fits it perfectly.
Posted by: tanstaafl.

Re: Zoom-Zoom - 30/04/2007 05:30

Quote:
The main issue I have is noise at higher ISOs - has this been addressed with the FZ50?


No.

Noise is acceptable (but visible) at ISO 400. 800 is usable if you have no other choice but noise will be objectionable, still better than no picture at all. 1600 is probably not acceptable, and 3200... well, it gives bragging rights, "My camera can shoot at ISO 3200, what can yours do?" but the pictures are completely unusable.

Nonetheless, the low light capability is much better than the camera it replaces, my faithful old Fuji Finepix 6900, which has given me six or seven years of completely trouble free service. My only complaints with the Fuji were poor low-light capability, and it was a battery hog.

tanstaafl.
Posted by: FireFox31

Re: Zoom-Zoom - 30/04/2007 23:46

Good demo! My staff are also liking the DMC-FZ50 (aka "Lumix") which my assistant and I chose for them. The image stabilization is great. When my assistant took a super zoom photo and showed me, I hardly believed it.

What were the settings on those four frames? I'm guessing (TL) full zoom out (or some wide angle?), (TR) full optical zoom, (BL) full digital zoom, (BR) then that crazy crop thing where it does digial zoom but crops the image to 1024x768 or something.

I discouraged my coworkers from using that setting since we could just do it in Photoshop afterward. Seems like that crop-zoom could become a bad habit; it's not proper zoom so don't rely on it. Is my recommendation too harsh?

A good camera! If I weren't so leery of Panasonic, I might get one for myself.
Posted by: gbeer

Re: Zoom-Zoom - 01/05/2007 00:13

Is noise of the type mentioned dynamic or static in nature. I've been told that for some imaging devices, the noise can be mapped and a filter then created to null out the same.
Posted by: lectric

Re: Zoom-Zoom - 01/05/2007 01:12

Quote:
Is noise of the type mentioned dynamic or static in nature. I've been told that for some imaging devices, the noise can be mapped and a filter then created to null out the same.


You mean something like this?

This is a picture of a friend of mine at work. I took it with a Nikon and used neatimage on it. Obviously, the left side is untouched, the right side is filtered.
Posted by: tfabris

Re: Zoom-Zoom - 01/05/2007 01:17

Ooo. /me tries NeatImage out...
Posted by: Cybjorg

Re: Zoom-Zoom - 01/05/2007 03:13

I use Neat Image. I highly recommend it.
Posted by: matthew_k

Re: Zoom-Zoom - 01/05/2007 13:22

This sample is a great example of why you want a clean image in the first place. By cleaning up the noise, you've lost a lot of detail. Of course, with a head shot, a soft focus look is usually desired, as it blurs the skin nicely.

I spent last week shooting with an Oly SP350, and the noise almost killed me. With the Rebel XT, I'm used to noise starting to be noticeable at 800 ISO, but with the SP350, the 100 ISO shots showed plenty of noise in the shadows. It still makes nice pictures when used properly though.

Matthew
Posted by: FireFox31

Re: Zoom-Zoom - 02/05/2007 00:22

/me bottles up NeatImage and sells it as anti-age cream!!
Posted by: lectric

Re: Zoom-Zoom - 02/05/2007 00:43

Quote:
/me bottles up NeatImage and sells it as anti-age cream!!

I usually get asked if I can make them a little thinner, too.
Posted by: gbeer

Re: Zoom-Zoom - 02/05/2007 00:45

The astronomy crowd fights noise by mapping the response of the entire sensor when there is no light. Then they use that map to correct the exposures made. They are relying on the sensor noise, cell by cell, being a repeatable effect. As opposed to noise that is introduced in some other part of the pipeline.
Posted by: lectric

Re: Zoom-Zoom - 02/05/2007 01:12

That would make sense to me. It would produce far more accurate results without modifying the original image whatsoever. Too bad such logic couldn't be built into the ccd by the camera manufacturers by default. Rather like how they used to map bad sectors on SCSI drives. Then again, they could just get better at making the ccd's more perfect in the first place.
Posted by: Roger

Re: Zoom-Zoom - 02/05/2007 04:35

Quote:
Too bad such logic couldn't be built into the ccd by the camera manufacturers by default.


Well, it ain't by default, but I believe that some cameras, when you take a long exposure picture will also take a blank picture and do the noise subtraction automatically.
Posted by: lectric

Re: Zoom-Zoom - 02/05/2007 11:06

That's cool. Does it not follow that the same principle could be applied to all images?
Posted by: tanstaafl.

Re: Zoom-Zoom - 03/05/2007 00:47

Quote:
What were the settings on those four frames? I'm guessing (TL) full zoom out (or some wide angle?), (TR) full optical zoom, (BL) full digital zoom, (BR) then that crazy crop thing where it does digial zoom but crops the image to 1024x768 or something.


TL: 10 MP, full zoom out, wide angle attachment (see the vignetting on the corners?)

TR: Wide angle attachment removed, 10 MP, full optical zoom.

BL: 3 MP*, full optical zoom

BR: 3 MP*, full optical zoom plus 4x digital zoom

All pictures were subsequently resized down to 640x480 to limit the file size.

*The camera offers the option of shooting at 10, 8, 5, 3, and 2 MP. The lower MP numbers mean that you are using just the center portion of the CCD, and while I don't understand the mechanics, using just the center of the CCD gives greater optical zoom. This is separate from the 2x or 4x digital zoom. Thus, the effective optical zoom ratios are:

10 MP: 12x
8 MP: 14x (?) don't remember this one exactly)
5 MP: 17.4x
3 MP 21.4x

Then you can use the digital zoom at 2x or 4x, to give a maximum possible zoom ratio of 85.6x.

In my case, since I "cheated" with the wide angle extender, I was probably well over 100x zoom from widest to most tele.

I make no claims that the most extreme zoom gave superb picture quality, but considering that the setup was the worst possible scenario, the picture was nonetheless surprisingly usable.

And yes, of course, I'd be better off to skip the digital zoom and use Photoshop or some other image processing software instead. But this was meant to be a total "in-camera" test, just to see what it could do.

tanstaafl.