Hi all,
While I don't mean to diminish the entertainment value of this thread, I would like to offer a few hopefully constructive comments...
First, I believe that most if not all of the shots in the opening posts (as well as Joms' previously posted HS30 images) were generally under-exposed and several were taken with insufficient shutter speeds to hope for solid image stabilization hand-held. This surely has contributed to the seriously high noise levels and motion blur in many of them. Birding in poor light is sure not easy, especially with a compact superzoom. A few of them taken in marginally better light do actually display pretty good captured detail considering they're 8mp, but the heavy noise in them makes that detail essentially unrecoverable. "Cleaning up the backgrounds" (even if done well) can do nothing to improve the gritty noise damage on the birds themselves, and really only draws more attention to it. I don't know of any NR post-process which could adequately reduce the noise in these shots without smearing the detail too.
Secondly, I think that whatever efforts have been made to develop these RAW files has largely failed to improve the finished IQ, and likely has produced less desirable results than might be achieved by in-camera jpeg processing. While I've not yet seen really good high-resolution detail produced by the HS30 in any mode, there have been several well-exposed HS30 images posted by others which displayed quite nicely, with decently clean detail at under 2mp... And they were all jpegs, both processed ones and sooc ones. Perhaps Kim or someone with EXR/RAW expertise could offer Joms some help here.
Lastly, I just have to say that despite any preference of form-factor or prejudice of brand... the best bird images Joms posted from his SX40 were of generally much better quality than anything I've seen so far from his HS30
Anyway, it seems we read this over and over in the forum... and not just from Joms:
"I love this camera... the way it feels in my hands... it's fast and responsive... it has great build quality". "It's a serious camera, not a toy".
... "Only the IQ is a bit disappointing... The images are soft, ...the images are noisy, never seem sharp enough, ...watercolor effect, ...the details are smeared even at base ISO... etc, etc".
And yet, those who choose these models and defend them against every obvious objection to their output quality, are repulsed by all the "toyzooms" and plastic body alternatives, ... image quality simply notwithstanding.
http://kenn3d.smugmug.com/photos/i-5PjDqWN/0/X3/i-5PjDqWN-X3.jpg
