Cameras

[forgotten_aria]

When my canon elph's switch started to break, I got a DSLR, thinking it might be the only camera I needed. Now, with us bloging about taiko a bunch, I'd like something small and inexpensive that I can have sitting around the wings of a stage that I can take pictures with when I'm not drumming. This means I need something that is good in low light. I poked around the net and found out that fujifilm's CCDs are different in a way that makes them very good in low light AND they have software blur and motion stablization. So I decided to get one and try it out. The problem is the general quality isn't that good. I'm targeting something that can make good blog pictures in low light on a stage where I can't use a flash, which I think this camera does perform that with as little motion blur as possible, but will the bad quality make me regret getting it. Is perhaps nothing better than a unitasker?

I used the canon elph sd300 as a benchmark since I loved it (until the switch started flaking.) I set them both to 1600x1200, since you don't care about high resolution for a blog picture and because the fujifilm has a 12800 ISO it might use if it's set below 3Mpixil. I set the bottle swinging and took the photo at the same time with both cameras.

100% crop

Canon	Fujifilm

You can see it does what it says, the bottle is almost blur free, however...
Here are the scaled full sized images:


you an really see the graininess. Now here's the kicker. Here I've forced it to ISO400 AND gave it a flash.


and the 100% crop:


I really can't decide if it's worth it. Am I completely spoiled by the quality of the canon (which, when new was a different price bracket entirely)? Or am I right to think that even though the lack of blur is great, the general quality lacking even under the best conditions?

Comments

[xiphmont.livejournal.com]

but is that an inherent sensor improvement, or just better on-camera noise filtering? dpreview might say (and if it's just better on-camera filtering, I can beat anything that a camera offers onboard with the noise removal plugins I wrote).

Last time I looked at dpreview, the camera sensors varied almost none at all (aside from size) and it was all about the onboard image processing filters that distinguished one camera from another. If the fuji really does have that much better a sensor, it's definitely worth knowing about. ISO 12800? madness!

[forgotten-aria.livejournal.com]

dpreview seems to have some market hype and not a real review right now, but they claim:

RPT is an umbrella term for the combination of cutting edge technologies such as the Super CCD sensor, Real Photo Processor and Fujinon lens,

though it' shard to know if that's ACTUAL real technology or hype.

http://www.dpreview.com/news/0801/08012407fujif100fd.asp