princess cat
Well-known member
will receive 850 tomorrow,should I keep?
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z850
- Thread starter princess cat
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1. With the camera in Auto, take outdoor landscape, indoor and low light photos, and check the noise levels.
2. Take photos under the same conditions, of the same places, with different ISO settings, and check the noise levels. Noise should increase with ISO, but the lowest ISO's should be clear and pretty noise free.
3. Reset everything, take photos under the same conditions in Auto yada yada, but with Fine, Normal and Economy jpeg compression. Notice if there is a significant difference in noise level between Fine and Normal, as Dazco found that his Z850 is very noisy in Fine but far better in Normal.
4. Videos: using the default movie mode (not Best Shot), take bright outdoor, indoor, and low light videos and check the noise levels. Take identical videos but with HQ and Normal quality settings, and see if HQ is noticeably noisier than Normal, which is another thing that Dazco found.
5. Check the sharpness of the photo at full wide and full tele. In Auto, take an outdoor photo of a building or something. Keeping the camera in exactly the same place, perhaps on a tripod or shelf/rail/stand, zoom in all the way with optical zoom and take another photo. Compare the sharpness of the two.
6. Corner softness: in Auto at full wide, take a photo of a brick wall or bookshelf, something with a lot of regular detail all the way through. Notice whether there is much softness or loss of detail in the corners, if any.
Please let us know your results, as they will be very helpful to other Z850 owners who are doing the same tests. It will also let you know whether you want to keep it or not. I'm sure you can return your camera if it proves inappropriate for what you want.
Does anyone have any more 'diagnostic' type tests to run?
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Archiver - Recording the sights and sounds of life
2. Take photos under the same conditions, of the same places, with different ISO settings, and check the noise levels. Noise should increase with ISO, but the lowest ISO's should be clear and pretty noise free.
3. Reset everything, take photos under the same conditions in Auto yada yada, but with Fine, Normal and Economy jpeg compression. Notice if there is a significant difference in noise level between Fine and Normal, as Dazco found that his Z850 is very noisy in Fine but far better in Normal.
4. Videos: using the default movie mode (not Best Shot), take bright outdoor, indoor, and low light videos and check the noise levels. Take identical videos but with HQ and Normal quality settings, and see if HQ is noticeably noisier than Normal, which is another thing that Dazco found.
5. Check the sharpness of the photo at full wide and full tele. In Auto, take an outdoor photo of a building or something. Keeping the camera in exactly the same place, perhaps on a tripod or shelf/rail/stand, zoom in all the way with optical zoom and take another photo. Compare the sharpness of the two.
6. Corner softness: in Auto at full wide, take a photo of a brick wall or bookshelf, something with a lot of regular detail all the way through. Notice whether there is much softness or loss of detail in the corners, if any.
Please let us know your results, as they will be very helpful to other Z850 owners who are doing the same tests. It will also let you know whether you want to keep it or not. I'm sure you can return your camera if it proves inappropriate for what you want.
Does anyone have any more 'diagnostic' type tests to run?
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Dave W.
Veteran Member
Add a step 7 of repeating the same corner softness test at full tele.
matt40
Well-known member
then yes.
If not,no.
If not,no.
As has been said, see what you think first. As long as wherever you bought it has a return policy just save every little plastic bag and all and make sure not to scratch anything. if it's from buy.com you have 30 days from the ship date to when UPS has the return in thier hands. That'll give you plenty of time to see if it's for you. After all, only YOU can answer your question. if that weren't true there would only be one digital cam on the market because everyone would have the ecaxt same needs and wants. In less than a day i've already gotten a good idea what it is or isn't capable of. And i'm nopt sure yet whether i'd give it up even with the HQ video mode being useless in low light. the NQ is pretty good there so you still have low light capability. Just give it a chance before you return it because many people are happy with thiers. you may end up being one of them. And i will say one thing to the good....aside from the negitives you've heard, the rest is awesome. the menus, the quality, features, size, LCD all of that. But realize this...if like me you were a P&S person before, be prepared to work at it and learn how to use all features because unlike canons and other P&S cams that have little to no manual controls, this one requires some knowledge to get great results moreso than the others. One of the first things i did was to set it from the default "auto ISO" to ISO 50 because in auto it tends to want to go to 200 and then adds a lot of noise. I say make it manual so if you want you can change it. But letting the camera decide ISO imo isn't good, at least not on this cam. Just the opinion of a total novice, but that improved my shots in a big way. Before that they all looked noisy as a rap tune. 
princess cat
Well-known member
beside movie mode is it that much better than 750?750 $259-850 $324.
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What are the ISO 50 photos like in comparison with what you got from the Canon? How do you like the ISO 50 photos from the Casio?
I only shoot in ISO 50 if I can help it, and Canon is notorious for staying at ISO 50 in Auto ISO regardless of lighting conditions.
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Archiver - Recording the sights and sounds of life
I only shoot in ISO 50 if I can help it, and Canon is notorious for staying at ISO 50 in Auto ISO regardless of lighting conditions.
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Do you like the movie light, or the longer battery life? The photos (when shot at ISO 50) seem to be sharper than the Z750 as well.
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Well, it's IMO not as clean as canon at 50. But you have to realize this is coming from someone new to this camera and pretty novice at that. But so far i still feel as i always have that canon's details are better. Like if you shoot at high res and look at the details in the crop of plants especially. the details are not near as clear and noise free. But then again look at Dave W and a few other's galleries and it seems like that CAN be overcome. I'm just not nearly good enough at this stuff to pull it off right now. But it does force you to learn what you're doing ! And yes, it always jumped to a higher ISO in anything less than blinding light or so it seemed anyway. Last nite i could not get a pic with anything better than horrific noise till i set it to 50. I too like to always shoot at 50 because i just have never seen a high ISO shot that isn't noisy. I don't understand why people want cameras with higher ISO capabilities, but i guess thats for those who know photography to know and for me to find out. Till then i'm sticking with my ISO 50, and if i need more light i'll get it by artificial means.
Dave W.
Veteran Member
I disagree that a P&S shooter has to learn alot with this camera to get good shots. All you have to do is what Dazco did and set ISO to 50. For most of my pictures I just set the ISO to 50 and used AUTO mode! Others with good pics with Z750's have said the same too. ISO 50 with this camera is great, ISO 100 is okay but I only use it if I absolutely need to. Higher ISO's like 200 I leave to those situations where I have to take indoor shots with no flash. They get noisy so I just do noise removal afterward with very good results.
This is the kind of thing I want to know. Bart mentioned that to bring out the detail, you'd either use in-camera sharpening, or Unsharp Mask on Photoshop/Paintshop. What kind of sharpness have you seen by boosting sharpness in-camera?
Here's my thinking: some cameras default settings are just 'better', or more personally preferable, than other camera's default settings. IMO, Canon have great default settings, and Casio's settings seem to take a bit of tweaking to get right. But the question is whether you can get the kinds of results that make you happy, with all the tweaking.
How do you find the colour reproduction/white balance accuracy? Are the colours close to what you see in real life? How do they compare with the S400?
Hm, that's a good thing to know. Manually set ISO to 50.
Increasing ISO increases the 'gain' or volume in the sensor. This means that the camera takes in more light at any one time, making hand-held low-light shots much easier. Greater gain = less time necesssary to get a decent low-light shot, which equals faster shutter speed and less tendency for hand-held camera blur. With higher ISO's, you tend to get clearer (less blurry) low-light photos.
I've been experimenting with my S70 and seeing the difference. I can get a dark street shot with high ISO that would be almost impossible with ISO 50. Higher ISO's also mean that with slow shutter speeds, you can get photos that are almost like night vision. But generally, you want to keep the ISO as low as possible in order to get the shot you want.
The problem is that higher ISO also equals higher noise. This can be solved through NR programs like Noiseware or Neat Image, or you can get a camera with a cleaner sensor, like most DSLR's and the Fuji F-series compacts. If I only wanted a camera for photo quality in low light, I'd buy a Fujifilm F11, or the F30 when it comes out. But the Z850 has all the features that I really want except for wide angle lens, so I'm still waiting, watching, reading the early adopter posts.
Thanks for posting about this camera so much. It really helps me, and I'm sure a lot of lurkers are getting benefit from this as well.
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Not to mention that there will likely be a firmware upgrade to fix no only the video problem but possible improve it in other ways that may make it a no brainer vs the 750. Could turn out to be a real gem i suppose.
to be honest i haven't really gotten that far with the sharpening. that is to say, i've used it but haven tried it with and w/o sharpening and then compared the details. But i'll try and remember to do that. (so many things to remember for an idiot !)
Actually, thats something i was afraid wasn't up to par when i first started looking at the sample and even when i took my first few shots. But once i got it dialed in i realized it's one thing i'm pretty much as happy with as the canon.
Definatly ! This camera love to pick higher ISO's if you leave it on auto. On my canon i had 50 set all the time. NEVER used anything higher because it always would be noisy as he~
No problem at all. I just hope some of what i have to say is valid and worth reading. Some things don't take a lot of knowledge, so i can at least be helpful in those areas. I benefit too because you guys find flaws in my thinking and explain them too me which helps me learn a lot of things.
wingnutdave
Member
Hmmmm.
Im haveing a burger and fries for lunch tommorw, shoudl I send it back before trying it?
Goodness, don't listen to others, JUDGE FOR YOURSELF.
Im haveing a burger and fries for lunch tommorw, shoudl I send it back before trying it?
Goodness, don't listen to others, JUDGE FOR YOURSELF.
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