Informal Camera Test

I recently purchased a new digital camera after finally deciding to put down my trustworthy Canon S45, which was the first digital camera I have owned, and judging from my current circumstances, still the best. I was so happy with my S45 that I decided to get another Canon camera, but this time I was going with one that is so new that I had to wait for it to be available for purchase. The specs were right and it was kind of exactly what I have always wanted from a digital camera. Small, low-key, a fully orientable viewfinder and a greater pixel depth than my meager S45’s 4.0.

Introducing the Canon TX-1. Oh, and get this, it shoots HD video as well!

I am not going to go into any detailed review of this camera, let’s just say that I love it a lot, but have been very unhappy with the apparent color depth or pixel depth compared to my old S45. So much so that I have written a letter to Canon and there is currently a message on my voice mail from the office of the President asking me to call back and discuss my dissatisfaction with the camera. You can here the message here if you want.

Meet Brad from the Office of the President of Canon
[quicktime width=”100″ height=”25″]https://www.interactivehank.com/docs/movs/brad.canon.mp3[/quicktime]

I decided I would do a very informal test of friends camera and see what gives.

What I noticed is that as soon as I start enlarging my TX-1 photos, taken at full resolution, they start to get blotchy and chunky and digitized looking. This was not the case with my S45 and with the TX-1 being almost twice the supposed pixel depth, I am thinking, That is not right at all.

What follows is a selection of test shots taken by friends with their respective cameras. All I asked for was a shot of blue sky taken at max resolution for that particular camera model.

I then opened up all the images and made a patchwork of samples for each camera at three levels of enlargement: 100%, 300% and 800%. I then placed the three strips side by side, keeping the compression to the lowest setting possible and posted the results here.

Now, I understand that pixel depth is not necessarily a great camera make, the quality of the sensor, the actual kind of sensor, the lens as well as many other things contribute to the overall image quality of any given image capturing device. But I thought it would be a good place to start and, well, I just felt like doing it. If you want to add your camera to the list below, just email me a full resolution image of a blue sky with the camera model number and I will take care of the rest.

I am placing my TX-1 at the top of the list, after that it is in descending order of theoretical pixel depth. But make sure you take a look at the sweet old S45 weighing in at the bottom with only 4 megapixels. I mean come on, it looks really good. By the way, I reset my camera to factory settings before I created the test image, this was recommended by Canon in order to try and troubleshoot the problem. I thought I would wind up with a better looking image making the whole issue just another matter of me messing too much with the controls of any device I get my hands on, but as it turns out, it is not the case. The image looks terrible, see for yourself.

The more cameras I add to this list, the more interesting the results become. You can clearly see how most of the time the higher resolution cameras retain color depth, the colors remain constant as I blow up the image. The other interesting note is that sometimes the quality is apparently due to the way the brain of the camera records the pixels, the ones that are smoother and softer always look better than the hard edged blothcy captures, regardless of the megapixels.

7.31.07 Update:

I just got off the phone with Brad at Canon CSR. He tells me that the preliminary information from the secret technicians is that past cameras used a pixel smoothing algorithym in order to take away some of the edgey blotchyness of the images. This resulted in a perceputally better image, though maybe not technically a better image. He says new cameras do not apply this pixel smoothing technique and that may account for the inferior look of my TX-1. Now, you can imagine my frustrationÂ and disbelief when Canon admits that they are making cameras that take lousy pictures, but on the other had I do indeed understand what the concept is, though it feels a lot like technology having the better of us. These pictures are SUPPPOSED top be better than past models, then certainly the ARE better. OK, well, he is still waiting to hear from the tech staff and is going to call me when they pipe in with the offical results. I will let you know them for sure.

He also suggested that there may be a software tweek that can be done to “smooth” the pixels out a little bit, this internal software alteration is available on some of the higher end SLR’s, he is not sure if it is possible with the TX-1. He also thinks there may be a link between the lack of pixel smoothing that was built into the TX-1 due to the fact that it captures HD content.