E100RS comparisons, help me choose

I would appreciate it if you could help me out and check out the hot pixel and noise comparisons I did with two E-100RSs. I am tryijng to decide which one to keep and which one to return. Please take a look at my comparison gallery (URL below). I will also upload some normal light and flash pictures when I get a chance, but right now I am concerned about the hot pixels and noise levels. All pictures were originally taken using TIFF, ISO 100. When I set camera to SHQ, of course the hot pixels start to show up a bit earlier.

Thanks for all of your help.

http://www.pbase.com/avian/e100rs_comparisons

Regarding the two cameras...Camera A has a bit of dust in EVF and possibly one bad pixel. Camera B seems to have a clean EVF.

Thanks again.

Load the images into irfanview, and raise the gamma to 4. The 16sec. images show amazing difference. I must try this on my own E100 for comparision.

Wery weird, there is a lot of hidden noise there, see for your self. Where the camera at the same temperature?
Good luck

J.-- http://www.vortex.is/~jonr/

Hi,

Don't worry about the EVF we all have the dust problem..see the two little screws surrounding it?? you will have to periodically take the viewfindser off by unscrewing these..get you a super small screw driver (like the ones for glasses) and blow the dust out. So no need to sorry about this, it is fixable I do mine every two months or so.

Carmen

bnewman said:

Regarding the two cameras...Camera A has a bit of dust in EVF and
possibly one bad pixel. Camera B seems to have a clean EVF.

Thanks again.

Click to expand...

Jón Ragnarsson said:

Load the images into irfanview, and raise the gamma to 4. The
16sec. images show amazing difference. I must try this on my own
E100 for comparision.
Wery weird, there is a lot of hidden noise there, see for your
self. Where the camera at the same temperature?
Good luck

J.
--
http://www.vortex.is/~jonr/

Click to expand...

I noticed the somewhat unnoticeable noise in camera b when I started doing some zooming in. Just seemed noiser to me than the other camera. The lens cap on pix were taken at the same time and in the same room. Both cameras had been unused since last evening so they were cold. It was also cold in the house this AM when I did this. I did download irfanview and changed the gamma and the amt. of noise is quite a bit, isn't it. Just shows that there are wide variations in CCDs. I'm going to do some lowlight non-flash pictures tonight and see how those look.
I'll upload these, too.

http://www.pbase.com/avian

Carmen said:

Hi,

Don't worry about the EVF we all have the dust problem..see the two
little screws surrounding it?? you will have to periodically take
the viewfindser off by unscrewing these..get you a super small
screw driver (like the ones for glasses) and blow the dust out. So
no need to sorry about this, it is fixable I do mine every two
months or so.

Carmen

Click to expand...

Thanks for the advice. Don't know if you looked at my boring repetitive lens cap on pictures but I am curious as to what you think about the two cameras. I noticed that you posted some low light pictures. How do your low lights turn out at very slow shutter speeds such as 4-16secs. Don't know if I want to keep the camera that has hot pixels show up around 1-2s. or keep the other where the pixels don't show up until about 4 but then the camera seems to be noiser. I guess I'm being overly picky but I've had my share of problem cameras in the past.

http://www.pbase.com/avian

Jón Ragnarsson said:

Load the images into irfanview, and raise the gamma to 4. The
16sec. images show amazing difference. I must try this on my own
E100 for comparision.
Wery weird, there is a lot of hidden noise there, see for your
self. Where the camera at the same temperature?
Good luck

J.
--
http://www.vortex.is/~jonr/

Click to expand...

I added some pictures of my birds which I took in a dark room, very little available light. I wanted to check out the low light abilities of the cameras as well as look at the noise/hot pixel levels. The differences are obvious.

http://www.pbase.com/avian/e100rs_comparisons

Camera b is definitely in need of service.
Way too many hot pixels in the bird shots.

bnewman said:

Jón Ragnarsson said:

Load the images into irfanview, and raise the gamma to 4. The
16sec. images show amazing difference. I must try this on my own
E100 for comparision.
Wery weird, there is a lot of hidden noise there, see for your
self. Where the camera at the same temperature?
Good luck

J.
--
http://www.vortex.is/~jonr/

Click to expand...

I added some pictures of my birds which I took in a dark room, very
little available light. I wanted to check out the low light
abilities of the cameras as well as look at the noise/hot pixel
levels. The differences are obvious.

http://www.pbase.com/avian/e100rs_comparisons

Click to expand...

Inigo Montoya said:

Camera b is definitely in need of service.
Way too many hot pixels in the bird shots.

Click to expand...

I actually think they are both in need of service. The amount of noise in camera b beyond 4 secs. seems very high. The very bright pixels in camera a starting at 1-2s is not acceptable to me either. I'm curious as to which camera you would keep, although maybe it doesn't matter if I'm sending it in for service. Camera b has perfect LCD and EVF. Camera a has a perfect LCD but some dust or possibly dead pixel in EVF. It bugs me that one has to send a brand new camera in for servicing to get it right.

http://www.pbase.com/avian

There was a thread here a week or so ago about "end of life" quality
issues with both the E100 and the UZI... basically saying they are
using up whatever parts they have left as the final runs are completed.
Maybe they figure the percentage of cameras that will actually come
back for warranty repair will be low enough to offset the added cost
of thorough QA testing, especially at the cut rate prices they're going
for now.

As for which I'd keep.... hard to say, but I'd probably go for the
one with lower noise. The hot pixels jump out at you first, but they're
probably a lot easier to correct than noise.

For example, if you have 16 hot pixels, you do a quick and dirty fix by
zooming in on each and cloning an adjacent and be done with it. Noise across
an entire image is more diffcult to remove without sacrificing some detail.

bnewman said:

Inigo Montoya said:

Camera b is definitely in need of service.
Way too many hot pixels in the bird shots.

Click to expand...

I actually think they are both in need of service. The amount of
noise in camera b beyond 4 secs. seems very high. The very bright
pixels in camera a starting at 1-2s is not acceptable to me either.
I'm curious as to which camera you would keep, although maybe it
doesn't matter if I'm sending it in for service. Camera b has
perfect LCD and EVF. Camera a has a perfect LCD but some dust or
possibly dead pixel in EVF. It bugs me that one has to send a
brand new camera in for servicing to get it right.

http://www.pbase.com/avian

Click to expand...

Inigo Montoya said:

There was a thread here a week or so ago about "end of life" quality
issues with both the E100 and the UZI... basically saying they are
using up whatever parts they have left as the final runs are
completed.

Click to expand...

That's not correct, Inigo. The poster didn't say that Olympus WAS doing any such thing. He said that it was COMMON in the electronics industry for manufacturers to use leftover parts to piece together the final runs of the product and that this COULD happen with the E-100RS and the C-2100UZ.

Inigo Montoya said:

There was a thread here a week or so ago about "end of life" quality
issues with both the E100 and the UZI... basically saying they are
using up whatever parts they have left as the final runs are
completed.

Click to expand...

But are these cameras final runs or have they been sitting somewhere for awhile?

Inigo Montoya said:

Maybe they figure the percentage of cameras that will actually come
back for warranty repair will be low enough to offset the added cost
of thorough QA testing, especially at the cut rate prices they're
going
for now.

As for which I'd keep.... hard to say, but I'd probably go for the
one with lower noise. The hot pixels jump out at you first, but
they're
probably a lot easier to correct than noise.

For example, if you have 16 hot pixels, you do a quick and dirty
fix by
zooming in on each and cloning an adjacent and be done with it.
Noise across
an entire image is more diffcult to remove without sacrificing some
detail.

Click to expand...

Thanks.

I was coming to the same conclusion. I look at the image with the very hot pixels and a little noise and figure I can clean it up. I look at the similar image from other camera with noise spread all over walls, bird cage, birds and think that this would be a difficult cleanup. Maybe it's also easier for Olympus to fix the lesser noise camera??

If I wasn't planning on doing some low light photography with slow shutter speeds, then I might keep the one that only gets noisy at slower shutter speeds but I do want to do some natural light night pictures.

http://www.pbase.com/avian