JPEG Image Size & Quality

Standard Test Scene

The EXILIM EX-Z3 allows you to select image size and JPEG quality separately. For image size you have the following options; 2048 x 1536, 1600 x 1200, 1280 x 960 and 640 x 480. For JPEG quality there are Fine, Normal and Economy settings. Note that the EX-Z3 does not provide a RAW or TIFF output.

To give an impression of what some of the combinations of image size and quality produce the table below is a cross reference of some of them:

• 2048 x 1536 Fine JPEG
• 2048 x 1536 Normal JPEG
• 2048 x 1536 Economy JPEG
• 1600 x 1200 Fine JPEG
• 1280 x 960 Fine JPEG

Images below are cropped 240 x 100 area of the image magnified 200% (nearest neighbour).

	2048 x 1536
JPEG Fine	1,639 KB
JPEG Normal	1,172 KB
JPEG Econ.	613 KB
	1600 x 1200
JPEG Fine	1,021 KB
	1280 x 960
JPEG Fine	665 KB

The EX-Z3 doesn't have the best demosaic or sharpening algorithms we've seen, and this has a direct effect back on to JPEG compression as these artifacts are seen by JPEG as more detail to store (thus larger file sizes). The Fine JPEG setting results in fairly large images, especially at full resolution, considering the availability of higher capacity SD cards I personally would stick to the JPEG Normal setting. JPEG Economy does introduce visible JPEG artifacts. The EX-Z3's downsampling interpolation algorithm works well and provides clean lower resolution images.