I got my first digital camera recently, haven’t had much time to take photos worth displaying because I’ve been learning how to use it. I took a photo on the way to pick up my daughter at the airport.
I thought it turned out alright, quality-wise, for such low light. It was a 1 second exposure at ISO 100 in Night Portrait->Illuminations mode, so yeah, there’s some blurring from camera shake but not as much as I expected for such a long exposure with one hand.
Testing FZ28 exposure compensation
Then I took this photo of some objects laying around the house, just playing around. I had read that one of the things that makes film superior to digital is the the exposure “shoulders” film has when it’s overexposed. Digital just flatlines over a certain exposure, goes straight to pure white, but film always has just a little bit left over, and it’s in the film so even when you scan the film to digital it’s better than straight digital in that regard.
The FZ28 has a setting where you can make overexposed areas flash black and white. The specular highlights in this one were flashing so, I did some exposure compensation. This one is at -2 ev, but then I adjusted curves in Photoshop to bring it back up. Another advantage of underexposure in this case is that the camera increased the shutter speed, so there was less blurring in this image than in the recommended exposure. A long focal length for this one, 300 mm equivalent, made camera shake more of a problem here.
But then as I was messing around with the gamma, I noticed if you set the gamma very high, you begin to see some noise blotches, great big blotchy areas like the thing got rained on. So I decided to take a closer look at the noise.
In the FZ28’s Picture Adjust section, I set the Noise Reduction to -2. I set mode to manual, then set the aperture to f8 and the shutter speed to 1/2000 second, turned the lights out outside the bathroom, turned the lights out inside the bathroom and shut the door, and then covered the camera in a black cloth and shot 12 exposures.
Inverting the resulting “black” exposure produced these two shots. The first is the full frame reduced to 12.5%, and the second is the center of the frame, cropped to 12.5%, which you can barely see.
FZ-28 black exposure, inverted, reduced
FZ-28 black exposure, inverted, cropped
These next two images are the same as the above, but with brightness set to -4 and contrast set to +96. As before, the first is the full frame reduced, and the second is full resolution cropped.
Contrast and brightness adjusted
Cropped, Brightness -4, Contrast +96
Finally, I made a couple of short gif movies of the 12 frames, both reduced and cropped. I like being able to see the noise in this way, you can see exactly what kind of noise is going to go into every single frame you shoot.
GIF movie of fz28 noise, reduced size
GIF movie of fz28 noise, cropped size
The sensor on the fz28 is pretty small, it’s 1/2.33 in digital camera jargon, which works out to about 30 square millimeters, compared to 243 mm^2 for the 4/3 format and 864 mm^2 for 35 mm film. So some people have been complaining about the noise, while others have been extolling the superior noise reduction software of the fz28.
I’d sure like to see this kind of analysis done for other cameras, though. I’ll try to do some more with the fz28 at different noise reduction settings.