It's interesting in that I think that it solved the mystery of why DPR's IS tests showed so many cameras doing extremely well at maximum focal length, including shots at 1/30 and 1/15.
I didn't follow. What are you seeing?
See if you can guess why the slow shutter speeds did much better than I expected.
No, tell me. They are overexposed by the time you get to the slower speeds.
Ignore the exposure for now, I'll get to it below. This was just a test of the effectiveness of the IS. Look at the results DPR got when it tested the HS10 and the other megazoom cameras at their maximum focal lengths. Many of them produced some blur free shots at the slowest speed tested, 1/15th sec., and many blur free shots at 1/30th sec., when according to most people here as well as DPR's own statement that IS provides an improvement of about 2 stops. But a 2 stop improvement means that at 720mm, shots taken with shutter speeds slower than 1/180th second should start showing blur and the results should be
very blurred for most shots at 4 stops below 1/720th second, which is 1/45th sec. The shots I took didn't show much of a difference in blur over the range of shutter speeds tested, 1/30, 1/60, 1/125, 1/250, 1/500 and 1/100 sec. What I did was that even though I took all of the shots hand-held I did rest the heel of one hand on a windowsill since for most handheld shots I always try to use
some additional support, whether it's the side of a pole, tree branch, etc. I really was surprised that the expected blurriness wasn't there, even at 1/30th sec. since even with the support, the small rectangular focus indicator moved constantly, never stopping for any of the shots.
I just took some additional shots, this time hand-held with no support. The results were noticeably worse at the two slowest shutter speeds (1/30 and today I added 1/15) but the 1/60 and 1/125 sec. shots were still very good. This time I took 3 shots at each shutter speed instead of 2 and this turned out to be a good decision since the percentage of noticeably blurred shots increased, but at each shutter speed above 1/30th sec. there was at least one good, blur free photo. Had I take a few shots with the 1/40 and 1/50 shutter speed, and if either of these also resulted in good, relatively blur free images, that would have been an IS improvement of 4 stops, well above what most people get from the HS10's IS. So I guess that even though my age is quite a bit beyond Lloydy, I can hold the HS10 steadily enough for a reasonable percentage of shots to show about 3 1/2 stops of IS improvement. It did take a lot of concentration, so I'd try to avoid shooting 720mm at 1/60th sec. and probably would use 1/125th second and faster, aperture and ISO permitting.
I also discovered two reasons for some of yesterday's shots being overexposed. I had used Multi Metering, not spot, and much of the frame outside of the central cropped area was fairly dark, including the tree leaves on the right side of the frame. This can be seen in the one full size image that was posted. For today's shots I also used Multi Metering but at this time of the day (much earlier, about 9am vs 6pm) the formerly dark areas were brighter, and the tree leaves were
much brighter since unlike yesterday's shots, they were now exposed to bright sunlight. The second reason is that I discovered that in Shutter Priority mode the aperture doesn't close down below f/8.0. Today I used ISO 100 instead of ISO 200 and by using Manual mode I was able to reduce the aperture to f/11. A little more work, but this way I was able to get more uniform exposures.
These are some of today's shots :
[1/125 sec]
[1/60th sec]
[1/30th sec]
[1/15th sec]
