I created a gallery of test photos with the new camera. Take a look at them here and tell me what you think. In the interest of making them vaguely more downloadable, I reduced them from 3072×2304 to 1280×1024, but that should still give you the right idea.
I’m not particularly happy with them, to tell you the truth. You would think having more megapixels would mean that the size of the dots of color noise would be smaller but that doesn’t actually seem to be the case. In all honesty, I think Deb’s 4 megapixel camera takes better shots.
Now I have to decide, whether I can live with that picture quality, or whether I should take it back to the store.
One other oddity: Take a look at the sheet music in this shot. Do you see the circular areas where it looks “smudged” on the right hand sheet? (There’s another one visible on the side of the grey filing cabinet.) Those areas are not in the original images! However, anything that displays or manipulates them on the Mac causes them to appear. If I use my PC to look at them instead, they’re gone. I can’t imagine what would cause that behavior, but it’s totally bogus.
Well. I figured out *where* the smudged areas came from, but not *why* it happened. It was apparently something that iPhoto did, since it wasn’t on the original. I can’t figure out why I saw the same effect when I looked at it with Photoshop Elements 4.0, though. Could it be checking if iPhoto has a modified version and given me that instead?
Of course, I showed the pictures to Deb and she said, “I don’t know, they look fine to me, but I’m not particular about these things.”
To see if I was totally off base, I hunted down a bunch of reviews of the device and they all said basically what I did: the durability is a plus, the low light noise is too high. There was one review that totally trashed it, but in general they were pretty positive for a consumer camera.
I’m still learning more about its various modes; “scene” mode seems like it help some of my issues, since you can warn the camera that you are going to be doing indoor, low light shooting. More experimenting required.