*plonk*Thank you for your helpful comment.Either [your] KIT lens is a lemon or you missed focused on the two first images.I repeated the shot with the Leica 45mm macro Elmarit and took a shot with the zoom set to 45mm. Shots turned out about the same, with a very slight edge in favor of the Leica. I also took a shot with the zoom set to 14mm, out of interest. Comparing the two zoom shots with yesterday's shot at 22mm was quite instructive:And, since it was no better on my other MFT camera, that "focus mechanism" would logically be in the lens. So much for the advantage of live view for magnified manual focus, grump.Hi Ted,Posting this out of amazement, after carefully setting a Panasonic GH1+14-45mm and the DP2M as equivalent as I could get and very carefully manually focusing on the power pole at the end of the street:
The difference in "detail" should be obvious even in the post view!
Having switched to Sigma (SD9) years ago, I must have become quite blasé as regards the Foveon, although I do recall being mightily impressed with the Merrills when they first came out.
With deteriorating eyesight and ever-shakier hands, I became nostalgic about the ease of use of the Panasonic 'G' models and thought I would try the GH1 for a while, hence the shoot-out.
Distance to the power pole was 175 meters. The GH1 was set to 3:2 aspect ratio to match the DP2M. The DP2M shot was re-sampled down to 4128x2752px giving a slight sharpness advantage to the DP2M but not enough to explain the jaw-dropping difference.
It's almost like the lens is bad (it's the 14-45mm G1 kit lens); I intend to charge up my G1 and see how that compares ...
Focus Magic finds a 7 pixel out of optimum focus on the left image which probably explains the vast difference. It's difficult to say what might have caused this but probably not the lens. It would almost have to be a terrible lens to cause such a dramatic difference. I'm betting that something in the focus mechanism was responsible.
I'm planning to repeat the shot with my other MFT lens.
note the different Nearest Neighbor zoom levels used to equalize the framing
My thinking leans towards blaming neither the lens nor the de-mosaicing. Maybe, in MFT, this is what you get at 650ft (170m).
Above at right, I was quite impressed with the 45mm shot. That street sign is about 100mm tall and the lettering font is about 10mm thick. You can almost, but not quite, read the street name.
At that distance, one pixel at 22mm focal length subtends about 33mm (about 1.3") so what you see is maybe not too bad for a kit lens and in-camera conversion to JPEG ...
--
Don't blame the camera
Still trying to upgrade photographer body
