Testing out the anti–shake & digital zoom
Follow-up to Couldn't resist… from Steve's blog
Whenever the opportunity presents itself, I spend some time playing with the new toy (that's what new toys are for, after all), discovering what it does well, what it does badly, and learning how digital photographt is different from film photography. Anyway, this weekend was an experiment with the anti-shake technology and a bit of playing with digital zoom, as it happens both on the same subject, namely this squirrel having breakfast:
This shot was taken at maximum zoom (the 35mm equivalent of 420mm) at a shutter speed of 1/10, hand held. Yes, 1/10. I was standing with my back against a wall, but still this is remarkably shake-free. Minolta's anti-shake technology was definitelty worth buying into! The shots were also taken through a window, which doesn't help with image clarity. Now for a digital zoom experiment.
On the left is an enlarged version of the squirrel taken from the shot above. On the right is a shot taken from the same place moments later, with a digital zoom of 2.4x applied, on top of the 420mm optical zoom. I don't see a huge difference between the two, and in fact have a slight preference for the one on the right. I had always assumed that digital zoom was a waste of time and didn't do anything that you couldn't do in Photoshop, and didn't do it as well. Now I'm not so sure. Since all of these images are reduced in resolution for Blogbuilder's benefit, the differences are not that great. If you take the left hand image and blow it up to 5MP as the right hand one is, the result is clearly not as good. Maybe digital zoom is worthwhile after all? I still have it turned off, so I don't stray into the digital zoom range accidentally, but after this little experiment I think I'm more likely to turn it on occasionally now.
Steve Rumsby
14 Feb 2005 12:19
| 
Tags: Photography
| 
Comments (7)
| 
Report a problem
Loading…
7 comments by 3 or more people
[Skip to the latest comment]John Rawnsley
On a recent trip to Berlin I was taking a lot of pictures in museums where tripods and flash were not allowed and the extra stops given by the antishake mechanism felt like it made a huge difference in pictures I was able to take.
We're still waiting for the 1600 ASA films to come back from processing that my wife took with her Pentax MZ-6 to see whether I gained a real advantage through using a camera with an antishake mechanism.
14 Feb 2005, 12:49
Steve Rumsby
Based on the above, it seems to be that the anti-shake it worth at least the couple of extra stops claimed for it, if not more. With my 35mm SLR, I'd get camera shake with a standard 50mm lens at 1/10, probably even when leaning against a wall. Certainly free-standing I can't handhold a 50mm lens at 1/15 without seeing shake. The above was a 420mm lens. It isn't pin-sharp, I agree, but I'm still staggered at how well it worked. There's no cable release either, so there will have been movement when pushing the shutter release.
14 Feb 2005, 13:29
I have a vibration reduction lens for my Nikon gear – 24–120mm, and the VR is very impressive. Apparantly the Canon IS stuff is good too, though not as good as nikon. This certainly looks like a good result from minolta though :-)
Digital zoom doesn't do anything that you can't do with photoshop – if you apply a gentle gaussian blur to the enlarged one you'll end up with the same result.
Remember that it's square law, so a digital zoom of 2 gives you 1/4 the resolution…
14 Feb 2005, 14:14
Steve Rumsby
As I said, that's what I'd always thought. And certainly if you can get access to the raw image data, or at least to an uncompressed version, I can see why that would be true. But with my Z5, all I can get is a "high quality" JPEG. If the digital zooming done in the camera is done on the raw or uncompressed data (and I don't know if it is or isn't), it is at least plausible that it could a better job than Photoshop could do on the JPEG that comes out of the camera. And certainly if the end results are no worse, then I can't see any reason to not use it. Drawing conclusions from a sample size of one is dangerous, of course, but the above suggests the digital zoom might be more worthwhile than I expected. I'll just have to take a lot more pictures to be sure. What a shame:-) The ability to take lots of shots without worrying about wasting film is certainly liberating…
14 Feb 2005, 14:37
John Rawnsley
It sure is. I just took over 600 pictures in Berlin in 3 days from which I have kept 180. I never used to take remotely as many on film. And I experiment more, so I find the pictures more interesting. I was very doubtful about going digital so kept putting it off, but I'm now very glad I did.
14 Feb 2005, 17:26
Steve Rumsby
Ouch. Do you keep those all on cards, or do you have some cunning device to transfer them to, or carry a laptop? I've got enough space for about 200 shots currently. Maybe I need to invest in some more…
14 Feb 2005, 17:44
John Rawnsley
My Canon 300D uses CF cards and I carry 3 1GB cards. I shoot RAW and get about 140 images per card. That gives me over 400 images without a return to base which is enough.
On trips I normally carry a firewire CF card reader and my 12" powerbook and empty the cards onto that. I back up to a second hard disk as soon as I can and burn DVDs back at home. I have been thinking about getting an Epson P-2000 but have not been faced with the decision yet as no-one has had them in stock either here or when I was in the US at Christmas.
14 Feb 2005, 19:33
Add a comment
You are not allowed to comment on this entry as it has restricted commenting permissions.