I bought my girlfriend a Canon EOS 400D a few months back and I'm impressed with every photo that comes out of it - but I recently wondered if that was just because I KNEW it was a good camera. How good is it really? I mean, my Sony Ericsson K800i has a FANTASTIC camera on it (considering its a phone) and the Nikon E4600 I have (and my girlfriend had before her 'upgrade') took great photo's considering its price and it was VERY rugged. How could I test this... So I took all 3 camera's out and took 2 sets of photo's with each camera. Guess who won?
Sony Ericsson K800i
Lets start with this device - and lets face it, its out of its league. Its a phone - its not a dedicated camera. But bearing that in mind, it holds its own pretty well! These are the two photo's taken.
Ok... They're not bad really. At 3 Megapixels, it has the least detail of the 3 camera and, upon closer inspection, it looks like the JPEG compression is pretty poor too. Also, possibly due to the small size of the lens/sensor, the cactus photo is blurred due to an exposure time of 1/30th of a second (which is pretty high for an outdoor photo).
Nikon E4600
This is a camera I have used for years and was a step up from a Jenoptiks budget digital camera what was absolutely pathetic. When I upgraded to the Nikon I was immediately impressed with the quality of the photo, however I think its starting to show its ages - hence it not really being sold anywhere anymore!
Clearly these are better photo's - the camera has a much better lense for starters. However, the Cactus photo (same light and position - no flash) required over twice the exposure time - 5/82 seconds (about 0.062s). The colours are much better though - this can especially be seen with the Rose photo. The K800i really washed the colours out.
Canon EOS 400D
Now prepare to be stunned!
WOW! Just look at all that extra colour that the Canon found in the rose! And the cactus doesn't look AT ALL washed out and its so much sharper. Remember - all shots were done at basically the same time. The Canon only required 1/60th of a second to take the cactus - thats half the time the K800i and a quarter of that required by the Nikon!
If you want to be even more impressed - try viewing those images at full size from the Flickr Account (click on the images to go to their Flickr page). The K800i photo's are in my account and the Nikon & Canon ones are in my Girlfriends account.
One final point - the Canon wasn't even in TOP quality. Those shots were taken with JPG compression (it can do RAW) and they're 'only' at 8 Megapixels (only, ha!) - we've not really felt the need to push it up to its maximum 10 Megapixels yet!
Back lit
The rose is a smallish foreground subject with a bright background so it required either fill-in flash (best) or to expose on the rose and not the background. The Canon used one or both of these methods. As you didn't mention doing this on purpose, it's even more impressive.
The flash didn't fire
I think it exposed more fully - but it certainly didn't flash (contrary to Flickr's "Flash" status). I manually told the Canon NOT to use flash (to try to keep the variables the same). I'm certain it didn't flash as the Canon has a flip-up flash which stayed firmly down :-)
Thanks for the comment.
dynamic or set spot meter
If no flash and you didn't adjust the exposure (you'd have said) then it has used either a post meter or a very centre-weighted one. Which means it either worked out that was required or it is the current default. I'm pretty sure you can adjust the metering on the Canon. Either way, nice.
Oh yeah - Fully adjustable
The camera is completely configurable - however for "fairness" I set all camera's to auto (except telling them not to use flash).
When you take the photo, there are about 9 points you see through the view finder. When in fully auto, it flashes the ones it's decided to use for this shot red while it focuses and I THINK does light detection on them too.
As it didn't use the flash - I assume it must have automatically detected the right combination of exposure, etc to get that kind of shot.
Good to see how the
Good to see how the automated functions of the camera kick in. The Canon looks like it went into portrait mode, focusing on the central image and blurring the background.
looks like the Nikon was very non-commital ;)
My first thought on seeing
My first thought on seeing the EOS400D photo was that it had fill-in flash, you can see it has, it's not a metering thing. I don't think it's possible to prevent the flash firing in full auto (green square) mode, is it? This, combined with the fact that as shown in Flickr's EXIF data, the camera says the flash fired... well, it sounds very likely the flash did fire.
Still, it's a cool camera, I've got one myself.
Canon EOS D400
I have bought this camera and love it. Most of the features are great and have some great results from the Roya Internationa airshow to see some resuts of a Canon EOS D400 try looking at the photos shown on this site :- http://www.fightercontrol.co.uk who can show people use it from standing subjects to fast moving aircraft and in JPEG RAW format.
If you do buy this I suggest that you invest in decent lens filters and a decent photo editor (Adobe Photoshop is preferred by most photographers)
Did you use a gray card?
It might be that the 400D just has better auto-white balance and if you white balanced the other images as part of your post-processing the colors would be just as vibrant despite the fewer megapixels.
Same issue if you didn't meter the light and used fixed settings for each shot. It could be that the auto-metering on the 400D is better.
Thats quite possible...
... However one of the criteria for this was comparing the output photo's in a like-for-like manner.
You're quite right to make the point though that the 400D is likely to have better white balancing - and for the price, it should (relative to a E4600 or K800i)
No flash and my professional observations.
If you did not use a flash or any other light source, why is there harsh shadowing between the petals indicating that a strong light source was used just above the camera?
I am a photographic professional and I know for a fact that this picture was not taken under the same conditions as the first two to which you compare.
In a situation where you have a dark and overcast sky as the only light source there would be no harsh shadowing between the petals.
Light from the sun is scattered by thick clouds (such as in your photograph), producing a diffused lighting pattern which is inherently soft and does not produce harsh shadows.
Although you may think that this last picture was not taken with a flash or another light source close to and above the lens, I can quite categorically assure you that it most certainly was!
Although I would agree that ANY dedicated Canon digital camera above a G3 would be greatly superior in image quality (even on full auto) to ANY mobile phone camera.
As for Nikon digital cameras, I have had experience with their 'compacts' including the Coolpix 5000 and quite frankly I was greatly disappointed with the quality or should I say lack of produced by cameras from this manufacturer.
Current Nikon cameras can not compete with the quality of any Canon EOS digital full stop.