princecelt
New member
There are a lot of comments regarding, what has been called, soft pictures and perhaps I have some insight that I hope is useful to the general audience.
From my own experimentation I believe that some softness, sufficient to cause noticeable image distortion, can be attributed to a rather subtle type of camera shake.
I shoot art: 2D and 3D for a number of artists on a semi-professional basis. I was looking at the various non-Nikon options available so borrowed a 20D for a weekend shoot: 2D art, 10 pieces, ~500 images.
I like to shoot with a relatively low shutter speed with the aperture fairly closed; think: f 5.6 to 8.
Immediately I found that the image was not sharp; for reference: comparable / worse than one of my 3MP cameras. Also noted that there appeared to be a direction to the softness. Because of image quality problems I could not complete the shoot with the 20D, so had to use one of my regular cameras.
To cut to the chase, I believe the function of the mirror mechanism is sufficiently strong that it causes a 2-3 pixel jump during operation at slow shutter speeds; note that all of my work with this camera has been with times slower than 1/15 s. I made careful analysis of the problem taking pictures of the same image with different cameras using different techniques; I have found that I can get 8MP quality JPEGs from the 20D by lifting the mirror first then taking the picture with a subsequent release. For my purposes, image softness is consistent and repeatable with slow shutter speeds where the mirror mechanism is coincident with image capture.
From my own experimentation I believe that some softness, sufficient to cause noticeable image distortion, can be attributed to a rather subtle type of camera shake.
I shoot art: 2D and 3D for a number of artists on a semi-professional basis. I was looking at the various non-Nikon options available so borrowed a 20D for a weekend shoot: 2D art, 10 pieces, ~500 images.
I like to shoot with a relatively low shutter speed with the aperture fairly closed; think: f 5.6 to 8.
Immediately I found that the image was not sharp; for reference: comparable / worse than one of my 3MP cameras. Also noted that there appeared to be a direction to the softness. Because of image quality problems I could not complete the shoot with the 20D, so had to use one of my regular cameras.
To cut to the chase, I believe the function of the mirror mechanism is sufficiently strong that it causes a 2-3 pixel jump during operation at slow shutter speeds; note that all of my work with this camera has been with times slower than 1/15 s. I made careful analysis of the problem taking pictures of the same image with different cameras using different techniques; I have found that I can get 8MP quality JPEGs from the 20D by lifting the mirror first then taking the picture with a subsequent release. For my purposes, image softness is consistent and repeatable with slow shutter speeds where the mirror mechanism is coincident with image capture.