I have been playing a bit with my new camera, a Panasonic DMC-FZ50, and while I haven't yet taken any pictures of any quality, the capabilities of the camera are pretty impressive.

Attached is a montage showing four full-frame pictures demonstrating the total possible zoom range of this camera. These pictures are exactly as taken by the camera, except that I resized them to 640x480 to keep the file size reasonable. In other words, they weren't photoshopped or anything like that.

A few things I have found to be interesting about the camera... the image in the viewfinder is light-amplified, so that in very dim light I can see detail not visible to the naked eye. The image stabilization really works -- I can get acceptable hand-held pictures (bracing my elbows against my chest) with one second long exposures, and with a bit of luck even longer than that. (Acceptable = viewable on my computer screen without too much blurriness; I'm not claiming they are razor sharp suitable for printing poster size! )

All in all, a nice toy.

tanstaafl.

Edit: Ooops... I see I messed up the montage -- two of the pictures are the same when one of them was supposed to be an intermediate zoom shot. There... fixed.

db

Congratulations on the purchase!

I have the FZ10, which overall I am very pleased with, particularly for photos of birds and wildlife - the zoom with Image Stabilisation is great isn't it! (image attached).

The main issue I have is noise at higher ISOs - has this been addressed with the FZ50?

The build quality is very good and the feel of the controls such as the manual focus ring is very smooth.

I also bought a Lowepro TLZ mini bag which fits it perfectly.

Good demo! My staff are also liking the DMC-FZ50 (aka "Lumix") which my assistant and I chose for them. The image stabilization is great. When my assistant took a super zoom photo and showed me, I hardly believed it.

What were the settings on those four frames? I'm guessing (TL) full zoom out (or some wide angle?), (TR) full optical zoom, (BL) full digital zoom, (BR) then that crazy crop thing where it does digial zoom but crops the image to 1024x768 or something.

I discouraged my coworkers from using that setting since we could just do it in Photoshop afterward. Seems like that crop-zoom could become a bad habit; it's not proper zoom so don't rely on it. Is my recommendation too harsh?

A good camera! If I weren't so leery of Panasonic, I might get one for myself.

Is noise of the type mentioned dynamic or static in nature. I've been told that for some imaging devices, the noise can be mapped and a filter then created to null out the same.

Ooo. /me tries NeatImage out...

I use Neat Image. I highly recommend it.

This sample is a great example of why you want a clean image in the first place. By cleaning up the noise, you've lost a lot of detail. Of course, with a head shot, a soft focus look is usually desired, as it blurs the skin nicely.

I spent last week shooting with an Oly SP350, and the noise almost killed me. With the Rebel XT, I'm used to noise starting to be noticeable at 800 ISO, but with the SP350, the 100 ISO shots showed plenty of noise in the shadows. It still makes nice pictures when used properly though.

Matthew

/me bottles up NeatImage and sells it as anti-age cream!!

The astronomy crowd fights noise by mapping the response of the entire sensor when there is no light. Then they use that map to correct the exposures made. They are relying on the sensor noise, cell by cell, being a repeatable effect. As opposed to noise that is introduced in some other part of the pipeline.

That would make sense to me. It would produce far more accurate results without modifying the original image whatsoever. Too bad such logic couldn't be built into the ccd by the camera manufacturers by default. Rather like how they used to map bad sectors on SCSI drives. Then again, they could just get better at making the ccd's more perfect in the first place.

That's cool. Does it not follow that the same principle could be applied to all images?