P850 sample pics discussion

Thanks to Ellen Blake and Ed Jay we now have some first full size pics taken with the P850. Ed was restricted to indoor pics (very important to me) and Ellen was able to take a nice variety of shots. Great job by both of you!

The pics from Ed are unedited, straight from the camera. Ellens pics have been saved using OfotoNow which (it seems) reduced the size of the pics, but I'm sure this did not change the quality that much.

My first impressions judging by these shots are quite positive.

1) It seems the noise reduction is less aggressive than my 6490, keeping more details in grass and no obvious/annoying smudging effect.

2) The low-light pics seem to contain quite a lot of detail in the dark areas, would love to see higher ISO results...
3) Did not see any chromatic aberration in the high contrast shots.

4) Some shots are over-exposed in auto mode? For example, the red channel values in the flower in this pic is completely out of the scale, which made the flower loose all detail. (I guess lowering the saturation setting might help, otherwise dialling in some exposure compensation surely will.)



5) Focus in the portret shot by Ed Jay seems off. Maybe macro focus would have worked better, but I prefer not having to do so for these standard shots.

What do other people think? Agree or disagree all you want

Bas

I had almost similar feelings about the shots which we sofar. I am waiting to see more photos but truly P850 shots are impressive.
Atindra

For example this shot



is very nice at 1/30 secs hand held at ISO 50. There is some noise but its quite fine grainy and not disturbing at all. Details are more definitely.
Atindra

We dont know yet the Jpeg compression settings and sharpness settings. But if all is set to default it is quite good result.
Atindra

It's a must to thank Ed and Ellen for thinking in "those freakys at the forum" and posting some sample images

And first the bad things I see: the images at full size look a bit soft/noisy to me sometimes. There are some areas in which detail is very good and noise quite low (for example at the photo that Atindra points), but in many others, edges of objects seem to change their "natural" sharpness to a mixed bag of noise and softness. Sometimes I think it's due to an out-of-focus perhaps caused by a very little depth-of-field, but it would be a very strange way of getting soft images.

The images Mike posted a time ago were really excellent in this area, but they were shot in RAW mode, so that makes me think that the in-camera processing is quite responsible for this.

The good things I see are related to the excellent colors I see (although as Bas said the red flowers lost of their detail in that photo), and relative low (near very low) chromatic aberration at telephoto showed at the edges of that black box (is it a bbq box??? ). Also at the photo Bas mentioned, it can be seen some CA at the light on the down-rigth corner, but again at a very low level. At last being an ultra-zoom model.

I see no purple fringing, though there are quite a lot of areas in which should appear "usually", say the trees branches with the (highlighted) sky beyond them, at whatever photo they appear I see no sign of purple fringing. Quite impressive.

I'd try to update the Kodak P-series site with this (huge) amount of new info. But remember that the news aren't there, cause it's intended to index/condense all the info viewed along the net.

Hasta!

--
Please, excuse my poor english...

You don't sound so confused, to me

Mato34 said:

And first the bad things I see: the images at full size look a bit
soft/noisy to me sometimes.

Click to expand...

Yes, agree. Then again, lenses with long zoom ranges are normally less sharp then others.

Mato34 said:

The images Mike posted a time ago were really excellent in this
area, but they were shot in RAW mode, so that makes me think that
the in-camera processing is quite responsible for this.

Click to expand...

Sorry to have missed those shots.

Mato34 said:

The good things I see are related to the excellent colors I see
(although as Bas said the red flowers lost of their detail in that
photo), and relative low (near very low) chromatic aberration at
telephoto showed at the edges of that black box (is it a bbq box???
).

Click to expand...

Not sure which shot you mean here. The black box standing on the grass was shot using wide angle. I do see what I think is sharpening halos on that box, not so bad though.

Mato34 said:

Also at the photo Bas mentioned, it can be seen some CA at
the light on the down-rigth corner, but again at a very low level.

Click to expand...

Yes, that looks like a little purple fringing to me.

Mato34 said:

At last being an ultra-zoom model.

I see no purple fringing, though there are quite a lot of areas in
which should appear "usually", say the trees branches with the
(highlighted) sky beyond them, at whatever photo they appear I see
no sign of purple fringing. Quite impressive.

Click to expand...

That was where I was looking as well.

Mato34 said:

I'd try to update the Kodak P-series site with this (huge) amount
of new info. But remember that the news aren't there, cause it's
intended to index/condense all the info viewed along the net.

Click to expand...

Thanks to you and Atindra for your work on this...

Bas

"Confused" isn't he rigth word, but my english is growning slowly...

About that black box standong on the grass, I meant image 100_0062, with a focal length of 72 mm. I think that the wide-angle shot it's 100_0061 (f.l. 6 mm).

In that telephoto 100_0062, the that "black box" presents a little of waht it looks to me like CA, along the whole left edge. But, as I said before it seems to be quite low (at less compared with some shots of the Canon S2 and Sont H1 I've seen).

Write me to the e-mail address that appears at



(this is to prevent spam...), and I'll contact you for a gift

Hasta!

--
Please, excuse my poor english...

Mato34 said:

About that black box standong on the grass, I meant image 100_0062,
with a focal length of 72 mm. I think that the wide-angle shot it's
100_0061 (f.l. 6 mm).

Click to expand...

Ahhh, my fault. I thought I had downloaded all the images, but I missed 100_0062. That's why I thought you were talking about 100_0061. Thanks for the clarification, I see what you were talking about now.

Bas

Hi,

I agree with your observation that images are bit soft. Yes noise is higher too with compare to DX sereis of kodak but the amount of detail it produced is much more impressive. Noise is still less with compare to FZ30. While colors are much better. The shot which Bas pointed out with red flowers only is not pleasing rest all the shots of Ellen are very good.

I still wonder what sharpness settings were used, if we know that, we can further comment on sharpness/or softness.
We have to wait till further feed back from the users (currently only two)
Atindra

This is another very good photo posted here, taken by Ed Jay.

its Exif shows 1/15sec, without flash at ISO 100. this doesnt look soft to me. If this camera delivers this type of shots it is very impressive performance.



Atindra

I noticed that all shots by Ellen and Ed are with maximum aperture (2.8 at wide and 3.6 at tele).

From what I understand, optimum image quality is normally achieved at medium aperture. If that is correct, why does the camera choose f2.8, even in very bright light?

Note: this is no critisizm, I think the shots are quite impressive, and am sure Kodak nows better than me. It is just something that I would like to understand better.

Bas

BTW. The specs said max aperture at telezoom is 3.7 Apparently they changed it to 3.6?

Atindra said:

Hi,
I agree with your observation that images are bit soft. Yes noise
is higher too with compare to DX sereis of kodak but the amount of
detail it produced is much more impressive. Noise is still less
with compare to FZ30. While colors are much better. The shot which
Bas pointed out with red flowers only is not pleasing rest all the
shots of Ellen are very good.
I still wonder what sharpness settings were used, if we know that,
we can further comment on sharpness/or softness.
We have to wait till further feed back from the users (currently
only two)
Atindra

Click to expand...

Lower the F-stop shallower the DOF. Larger apreture gives more light and I observed mostly in Auto mode P&s camera prefer to have lowest F-stops to have best possible light to have more accurate exposure may be.
Atindra

Bas Meijer said:

From what I understand, optimum image quality is normally achieved
at medium aperture. If that is correct, why does the camera choose
f2.8, even in very bright light?

Click to expand...

I've noticed, with my 7590 too, that the P-mode seems to choose
the widest aperture. I believe it's designed that way because that forces
a faster shutter speed and pictures are less likely to look blurry
due to camera shake or subject motion. Motion blur looks worse to
most people than a slightly soft image because the lens is not at
the optimum aperture.

I would think the in-camera algorithm would be slightly different with
the 850 because of the image stabilization.

Darrell
http://members.aol.com/pixbydg/look/Gallery.html

I agree with you here Atindra.......this is the kind of low light/no flash result that most likely will make me upgrade my DX7590!

Atindra said:

Atindra wrote:
This is another very good photo posted here, taken by Ed Jay.
its Exif shows 1/15sec, without flash at ISO 100. this doesnt look
soft to me. If this camera delivers this type of shots it is very
impressive performance.



Atindra

Click to expand...

samples...

My family is in from NJ. I will try my best to upload sample picts.

Tom

We only can thank your attention. Things will come as they can

Hasta!

--
Please, excuse my poor english...

The size of the pictures of Ellen is a little more than 1 mb. The ones from Ed Jay ar about 2 mb. A few weeks ago Mike wrote that the typical filesize would be 3 till 3.5 mb. Are the ones from Ellen and Ed Jay resized or have'nt we seen pictures with the finest quality till now ????

@rjan

Hate to be a "wet blanket" but very ordinary pics

... I wouldn't see "very ordinary", but yes "disappointing" in the sharpnes/resolution area.

Sure they'll look excellent printed, because color, contrast, CA... everything seems wonderful. In fact, I'd say that this is quite typical from Kodak. But also typical is that viewing the images at 100% they don't look as well, mainly due to the overprocessing and fault of sharpness/resolution.

Hey! I knew about it and I bought a DX 7440! I don't care about this fault for my social photos. I just want to get punchy and very good-looking photos to share with friends, print at normal sizes... To get "performance photos" I have my KM Z2, which can shot in RAW also.

But the P-series was expected to be pointed to enthusiast users, and I think that this means very-good quality at pixel-per-pixel level.

Anyway, that's the reason of RAW, letting us to get superior quality with a manual post-processing. It doesn't sound too bad to me, as I am acostumed to make that with my Z2 (JPGs images suffers from poor colou balance): we have a very good specified camera that shots easily in JPG getting nice images to share and print, and a very powerful tool using RAW mode.

The only thing (at the moment, we must see more photos, I think) is that JPGs could have been better processed.

Well, I think this is my longer message here... arf!

Hasta!

--
Please, excuse my poor english...

I wrote:
"I wouldn't see "very ordinary"...."

I meant:
"I wouldn't SAY "very ordinary"..."

--
Please, excuse my poor english... and also my errors when writing...