David J Taylor wrote:

measekite wrote: []



I have always believed that the Leica lenses are better. It is just that all of the reviewers claim that the S3 had better image quality and that noise is an issue on the FZ8. And since I want to do heavy cropping and print letter size that issue looms larger for me. I really like the speed, menu system, and now the EVF of the FZ8. It remains to be seen if the facial recognition and other new features of the S5 would be valuable for me. But image quality is the uppermost criteria.



If you need to do heavy cropping, I would suggest that either: - you get nearer the subject - you extend the zoom range - you get a 10MP DSLR with a high-quality telephoto lens If image quality is paramount, perhaps only a DSLR will do? As far as I can gather, the basic image quality is very similar for any of these small sensors (given similar area and pixel density), but some cameras by default do more noise reduction or different noise reduction, resulting in the reported differences in perceived quality.


The reviewers claimed that shooting in raw mode may help mitigate the noise but then you have to speed a great deal of time on all of the photos to get what you want.  I would like to see a head to head comparison of the S5 and FZ8 on image quality, exposure, focus accuracy and speed, and all of the other factors.  After all these are the two primary choices a person has along with Sony and maybe Olympus.


The differences are subjective, depending on whether you prefer sharper pictures with slightly more noise, or slightly less sharp pictures, with slightly less noise! Different subjects will be a better or worse match to different processing techniques. Cheers, David