Mike Johnston weighs in on the Panasonic GF1 vs Olympus E-P1, the new "big compact" cameras.
[Update: part II is up.]
One thing he says is something I've been trying to suppress in my mind: they are not quite as good in low light as DSLRs with the same size sensor. I love my GF1, but the pictures at 1600 ISO are just barely usable, you really have to fiddle with RAW and such. I'd have expected them to be easily usable at that setting.
It's a little bit disappointing, and I have not heard much talk about it, much less any explanation.
After all, the whole point of the larger sensor, compared to "traditional" compact digicams, is better low-light performance. Which they do have, but not as much as hoped and expected.
Eolake,
ReplyDeleteIf you shot film 10 or 15 years ago, low light, 800 pushed to 1600, what you got was a "mess". I'm getting very nice stuff at 800 from a pocket digicam, or even better when I drag the big gun along, my G9. The G9 is two generations obsolete, and it still out performs film at low ISO's. With the addition of stabilation, I can go into museums and get wonderful, clear images; screw the no tripod rules. I'm just saying, it is good now, digital is a wonderment.
Bron
Oh, I totally agree.
ReplyDeleteMy Nikon D90 takes nice pictures at 3200 ISO, and the Canon 5DII very usable ones at 6400. Awesome.
You have to be careful about what the manufacturers define as their ISO sensitivity. Going by DXOmark, which measures only the raw sensor performance, a D300 (probably about the same as your D90) at manufacturer's ISO 1600 has a real measured ISO of 1145 and a signal-to-noise ratio of 27.7 dB. Your GF1 is probably about the same as the G1, which at manufacturer's ISO 800 has a measured ISO of 1117 and a SNR of 26.2 dB. In other words, the true sensitivities of the D300 at ISO 1600 and the G1 at ISO 800 are about the same, and the D300 has a small edge in SNR at the same real measured ISO.
ReplyDeleteAll this assumes that you're going to shoot RAW. If you want to use the camera's JPEG output, then the difference can be possibly much more pronounced depending on how sophisticated the manufacturer's in-camera noise reduction is.