These photos are a tough exposure challenge, if they come out OK, the camera in question can probably be coaxed into delivering a good flash exposure of any subject within its range. Note too, that the normal flash shot as opposed to the slow sync one, if the camera offers that feature will be sharply rendered, any subject or camera movement frozen by the quick pop of the flash. That makes this shot a good one to look for the effect of over-aggressive noise suppression in the model's hair.
The incandescent lighting used in most US homes actually has a very strong yellow color to it. Our eyes have an amazing ability to ignore color casts like this, something digital cameras struggle to emulate. The incandescent lighting used for this shot is thus not only very common here in the US, but also very difficult for most digital cameras to deal with.
While we probably want a little yellow color to remain in the image to convey some of the mood of the original scene , too much will look unnatural and distort colors. Most cameras' auto white balance systems have a great deal of difficulty with this shot, but many incandescent white balance settings struggle as well. It seems that many cameras' incandescent settings are actually calibrated to the tungsten lighting used in professional studio systems, which isn't nearly as warm-toned as typical household lighting.
If you intend to do much shooting indoors after dark, pay careful attention to this test, as cameras vary widely in this regard. ISO represents twice the sensitivity of ISO , meaning that you can use a shutter speed that's twice as fast. Higher ISO settings are often required to get any picture at all when shooting after dark, but even in full daylight, using a higher ISO can help you freeze fast action.
The problem is, increasing a digital camera's ISO also increases image noise. In practical terms, this means that higher-ISO images often can't be used to produce prints as large as lower-ISO ones. The tricky thing here is that high-ISO images often look much different when printed at various sizes than they do when viewed on-screen. In particular, for any level of image noise, you'll often find that while noise is quite evident at larger print sizes, as you reduce the size of the prints, there will come a point where it suddenly ceases to be an issue.
We routinely print high-ISO photos from the cameras we test on our studio printer currently a Canon i at a range of sizes, and report our findings. If you're interested in investigating the effect of image noise for yourself, don't judge cameras' performance by how their images look on your CRT, viewed pixel-for-pixel.
Rather, download the test shots linked in the table below and output them on your own printer, so you can see how prints of various sizes will actually look. One additional note about this particular test series though: Because these images are shot under household incandescent lighting, the camera has to boost its blue-channel signal quite a bit to get back to a neutral color balance.
Since the blue channel is generally the one with the most noise, this makes this shot a real acid test of noise performance. Noise levels in high-ISO shots taken under daylight conditions usually won't show as much noise. Like several of our tests, these images are actually photos of a high-resolution poster, shot under studio lighting. The shots for this camera were captured with our third-generation House poster, which was assembled from 45 separate megapixel images, shot with a very high-quality lens, and then stitched together into a single image.
The resulting image amounts to about very high-quality megapixels. This should have sufficient detail to comfortably challenge cameras up to at least megapixels. And even with higher-resolution cameras, we believe that the camera lenses themselves would be more likely to limit resolution than would the detail in the poster. Why did we choose to shoot a picture of a picture? The idea was to show a typical subject a house and surrounding foliage in a way that would be absolutely consistent from camera to camera.
Any outdoor subject is going to vary considerably from day to day, as the lighting changes with the weather, atmospheric conditions, and season. Shooting a poster lets us compare images from cameras shot weeks, months, or even years apart, with the sure knowledge that nothing has changed from one shot to another. Things to look for here are fine detail, as seen in the foliage and tree limbs against the sky, sharpness in the corners, and the preservation of subtle detail in the shaded brick patterns.
While the House poster in the shot above provides absolute repeatability from test to test, it doesn't offer the range of brightness dynamic range that the original scene had, nor does it contain the nearly infinite range of fine detail found in nature.
For these reasons, we still shoot the original house, even though the vagaries of nature mean that no two shots will ever be directly comparable. In fact, over the eight or so years since we first shot this subject, the trees in front of the house have now grown so large that they obscure much of the subject.
Things to look for here are how well the camera handles the range of light levels from very bright to quite dark, and how well it renders the very fine detail visible in various parts of the image. Note though, that because this is shot outdoors, the character of the light is unavoidably going to change quite a bit, depending on the atmospheric humidity and the time of year.
Simply reading "4. It also says nothing regarding just how wide the wide-angle end of that range is. To give you an idea of exactly what each camera's zoom lens does, we shoot this series of images, showing results at maximum wide angle, and maximum telephoto, and telephoto with "digital zoom" enabled if supported. Note of course though, that so-called "digital zoom" just crops out and enlarges the central pixels of the image, achieving increased size at the cost of reduced resolution.
Because most of its various elements are now contained or represented in the combination of the Still Life and Multi Target shots, we no longer routinely shoot the Davebox by itself, as would normally appear in this space.
We do however, still use it for our low light test below. Many are interested in close-up or "macro" photography. This test shows the best results we could obtain using the kit lens. What to look for:. Low light photography is an area where there are really enormous differences between digital camera models.
This test starts at a light level about equivalent to typical city street lighting at night one foot-candle , and then progresses down from there, each successive test being at half the light level of the preceding one.
You may also see the effect of poor low-light autofocus in some of these shots, although we use a different test setup to check autofocus performance more directly. The results of which are reported on in the main Test Results section. Things to look for here include:. Lately, many manufacturers specify flash range with the camera set to Auto mode, in which the camera is free to boost its ISO setting to help increase the flash range.
This does increase the range, but it's easy to have too much of a good thing: Too high an ISO can leave you with too much image noise. The variable ISO setting also means that there isn't an easy way to compare the range with the fixed-ISO shots in our standard flash range series. So now, we also test the flash under the manufacturer-specified conditions whatever they may be, but frequently with the camera set to Auto mode , and the look at both how brightly the scene is lit, and how much image noise is present in the resulting images.
Flash range for SLRs will vary with the lens used depending on the maximum aperture , so their flash range is commonly expressed as a Guide Number, or GN for short. The guide number is a distance, in either feet or meters, at a given ISO. To find the maximum flash range at a given aperture, just divide the guide number by the aperture. The flash units on many digital cameras don't illuminate the scene very evenly, especially at wide angle focal lengths, so the photos here shows how uniform the flash coverage is.
As noted earlier, this test uses the same target as our flash range test, but for the uniformity tests, we take care to frame the target the same from camera to camera. Approximate, they roughly split the difference between the and aspect ratios.
Viewfinder accuracy is an important parameter, especially for shots where framing is critical. It's likely that this is a deliberate design choice by the camera engineers, to help avoid users accidentally cutting off the heads of their subjects. Unlike the optical viewfinders, the LCD viewfinders on most digital cameras tend to be quite accurate. Still Life This is our new "Still Life" test target.
This is just the sort of detail that noise suppression processing tends to flatten out. If you look at the detail in these swatches as the ISO increases, you'll see just where different cameras start to lose subtle detail.
The label of the vinegar bottle second from the right is another great place to look for lost detail from noise suppression, as the image of the person at the top of the label is actually a depiction of a mosaic. The dark colors in the background and in the figure's clothes contain detail that's very quickly lost when a camera's noise suppression system kicks in.
Cameras with really high-quality, low-noise sensors that require little noise suppression will be able to hold onto the detail in these areas, many others will show only a uniform swath of smudged color. Another place where you'll quickly see the effects of over-aggressive noise suppression is in the white salt grains of the salt grinder in lower left. Cameras are often more conservative about suppressing noise in highlight areas because our eyes tend to see less of it there , but many cameras seem to have a hard time holding onto the subtle shadings that distinguish the salt grains from each other, particularly at higher ISO levels.
Fine Detail : You'll find a lot of fine detail in the label of the beer bottle on the right, in its fine cursive text, but the other bottle labels hold a lot of fine detail as well. Fine text is often a good visual indicator of resolution, because our brains have an excellent idea of what the text should look like, so are very quick to notice even minor loss of detail.
Some of the fine lines there are extremely fine indeed. Looking at results from many different cameras with this target, we found that camera noise-suppression systems often confuse the fine lines with image noise, and so flatten them out.
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