odklizec
PK
Many prospective R8 buyers and people who are considering upgrade of their old (or not so old) trustworthy R cameras complaining about R8 image quality. The truth is that many R8 samples shows somewhat ugly per pixel performance. I think it's partially caused by excessive sharpening (even at Soft) and partially by noise reduction, which performs differently in daylight and night shots. I was curious if there would be a visible difference in lower resolution shots produced by R8 and the results are really surprising! The 8MP out-of-camera photos looks very acceptable at pixel level! Look at these 100% crops.
Here you can get the full size files:
Out of camera 10MP file (Fine quality):
R0010254_normal.jpg
Out of camera 8MP file (Normal quality):
R0010257_normal.jpg
Original 10MP scaled down on PC using Bilinear algorithm:
R0010254_8mp_pc_bilinear.jpg
It's really interesting to see such big difference visible mainly in tree branches? Of course, scaling the pictures down makes them always a bit softer and so nicer at 100%. Lower resolution also hides many of the ugly details seen in original photo. But the R8 down-scaling algorithm seems to be very good? Either this or the camera processing routine is quite different on down-scaled photos? But the important point is, that the 8MP photos looks very good at pixel level? Much better than the original 10MP files! I will have to do more tests to be sure it's really that good. I'm particularly interested about differences between R7 native 8MP photos and R8 set to down scaled 8MP mode.
Here you can get the full size files:
Out of camera 10MP file (Fine quality):
R0010254_normal.jpg
Out of camera 8MP file (Normal quality):
R0010257_normal.jpg
Original 10MP scaled down on PC using Bilinear algorithm:
R0010254_8mp_pc_bilinear.jpg
It's really interesting to see such big difference visible mainly in tree branches? Of course, scaling the pictures down makes them always a bit softer and so nicer at 100%. Lower resolution also hides many of the ugly details seen in original photo. But the R8 down-scaling algorithm seems to be very good? Either this or the camera processing routine is quite different on down-scaled photos? But the important point is, that the 8MP photos looks very good at pixel level? Much better than the original 10MP files! I will have to do more tests to be sure it's really that good. I'm particularly interested about differences between R7 native 8MP photos and R8 set to down scaled 8MP mode.