Help with a new camera

[James_Moronington]

Hi all,

I'm a new user and I hope you experts can help me out.

I have just bought an Olympus SP-565UZ and am having trouble getting a sharp image. I have attached an image of the kind of shot I am getting.

The images appear fuzzy and almost like an oil painting up close. What am I doing wrong? I have tried different settings (default, portrait, indoor, flash on/off, fast shutter speeds etc) and I still get the same look - with compression set to Fine and Normal, it makes no difference.

I have it set to 10 Megapixels so it's not as if I am complaining about low quality 640x480 images.

Hope you can help out, thank you very much.

[andy153]

Hi James, I do not know this camera and have never used one, but I have just read through a couple of reviews of it and it should certainly perform better than the example you have given. A couple of questions first - Is the thumbnail the full frame image? I suppose you resized it for posting. Was the thumbnail shot taken through a glass window? I take it that is your Apple keyboard and how far from the object were you? The closest you can focus in Standard mode is about 4 feet. Can you remember the settings? Please set the camera on fully automatic and take a shot of the street outside your house and post it as a comparison.

[James_Moronington]

Originally Posted by andy153

Hi James, I do not know this camera and have never used one, but I have just read through a couple of reviews of it and it should certainly perform better than the example you have given. A couple of questions first - Is the thumbnail the full frame image? I suppose you resized it for posting. Was the thumbnail shot taken through a glass window? I take it that is your Apple keyboard and how far from the object were you? The closest you can focus in Standard mode is about 4 feet. Can you remember the settings? Please set the camera on fully automatic and take a shot of the street outside your house and post it as a comparison.

Hi Andy,

Yes, that is a resized/cropped image. I was stood about 4 feet away and that image is a (not too extreme) close up to show the fuzzy problem.

It was not taken through a window but just stood a few feet back.

I took some photos outside in the sunlight and the problem isn't as noticable when everything's in focus (the same oil painting look is still there when I zoom in a bit).

Will there be a better setting for indoor other than the actual 'Indoor' setting? I've seen some indoor product photos on eBay that will be taken in similar conditions that look great. I'm not sure what to change to fix the problem.

Thanks for your help so far Andy!

[andy153]

Hi James, Try the shot again, from a minimum of five feet - measure the distance to make sure of it and then re attach to post so I can look at it. If you were inside the four feet you should have switched to the intermediate macro mode before taking it.

[James_Moronington]

Okay, I'll wait until its similarly lighted tomorrow and try the two things you suggested (another shot of the keyboard indoors and an outside shot on auto) - I don't want such different lighting conditions to affect my results.

I'll post those images tomorrow, hopefully. Thanks for your advice so far.

[postcardcv]

It looks to me like this shot was taken at a high ISO and a combination of noise and in camera noise reduction have removed all the detail. Bridge cameras like your one tend to perform very well upto ISO400 and then the image quality falls away dramatically at higher ISOs - what ISO was this shot taken on?

[James_Moronington]

Originally Posted by postcardcv

It looks to me like this shot was taken at a high ISO and a combination of noise and in camera noise reduction have removed all the detail. Bridge cameras like your one tend to perform very well upto ISO400 and then the image quality falls away dramatically at higher ISOs - what ISO was this shot taken on?

I just checked and it says ISO-800 and Exposure Ime 1/500 sec.

What can be done to fix this?

[James_Moronington]

Originally Posted by andy153

Hi James, Try the shot again, from a minimum of five feet - measure the distance to make sure of it and then re attach to post so I can look at it. If you were inside the four feet you should have switched to the intermediate macro mode before taking it.

Hi Andy, I have taken some shots on automatic like you asked.

PC Photo 1 - This is the keyboard shot on Auto taken from 6-7 feet away.

PC Photo 2 - This is the same keyboard shot taken from about 6-7 feet away but with the indoor setting and with flash. Looks awful.

Outdoor Photo 1 - This is one of my garden on auto mode.

Outdoor Photo 2 - This is another Auto garden shot.

Even at actual size you can see the fuzzy problem on the grass. What are you thoughts on what's going wrong?

Thanks for your help.

[yelvertoft]

I think postcardcv has hit the nail on the head. PC Photo 1 is ISO 100, PC Photo 2 is ISO 800. Bridge cameras such as yours will lose huge amounts of detail at higher ISO settings. The other images, especially the outdoor ones, show that there is nothing actually wrong with your camera at all. If the picture you attached in your original post is a crop taken from an image similar to PC Photo 2, then I'm not surprised it looks as bad as it does, this would be a very, very small part of the overall image.

The fuzzy bits on the grass are again as I would expect from this kind of camera. A zoom lens that has an equivalent 35mm film focal length range from 26mm to 520mm(!) is not going to be as sharp as a Leica prime. Also, the size of the sensor in the camera is very small on these kind of cameras compared to dSLR models, together with the in-camera jpeg processing, the results are consistent with what I'd expect from a bridge camera.

The pictures are all pretty much what I'd expect to see. If you insist on pixel peeping at 100% image size, using ISO 800 on a bridge camera, then you are going to be disappointed. Look at the picture, not the pixels.

[James_Moronington]

I'm guessing I should have gone with my original thought of a DSLR instead of high-spec Digital Carema.

I had my eye on two others, would a camera like the 'Sony DSLR-A200K Digital SLR Camera' or 'Nikon D40 Digital SLR' produce noticeably superior pictures and eliminate this type of problem?