Wednesday, June 01, 2011

My Camera Comparison: Part 1 - Interior No Flash

This is the first of a few tests that I'll be making with our three digital cameras that we currently own. The goal is to decide if it's worth taking older dedicated cameras on an upcoming trip or to simply use the cameras built into our phones.

The three cameras in question are:
Of course this isn't all about image quality. I'll be comparing the other pros/cons in a later post.

This comparison was a simple cereal bar that was sitting on my desk. There was some indirect light coming from the window but both the Olympus and Kodak cameras wanted to use their flashes. I turned them off.

After cropping the images to focus on the same point, I resized the two smaller images up to the largest (from the EVO). Despite nearly doubling the resolution of the Olympus image, it still looked great.

The Results

The EVO had by far the most noise. So much so that despite it's mega-pixel advantage much of the detail was lost. The color accuracy is good.

The Kodak camera had a difficult time focusing in the lower light. This camera has difficulty focusing in optimal conditions. The label is a bit more readable than the EVO but not by much.

The Olympus was able to focus, even in the lower light and all the detail is clear and legible, even with only 2.1 mega-pixels. The color is off, but it's clean. The noise levels are low and what noise there is seems to be mono-chromatic minimizing it's effects.

(click image for full resolution and detail)

The winner is clearly the Olympus. Under these circumstances mega-pixels don't mean anything. The Kodak and HTC just don't have the optics for lower light images.

I have more testing to do before I crown the Olympus a winner, but it's interesting so far that an 11 year old camera is standing up to what is quickly becoming the standard fare for most casual camera users.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I have been thinking about doing a similar comparison with some of my cameras. I am not surprised that MPs do not mean anything under these conditions, but 2.1 out performing 8 is pretty incredible.