Canon S1 IS: Focus, Lens or What?

ISO 100 in good light, so no noise.
But I'm really talking about camera shake . The FZ IS does a great job.

measekite wrote:
If the Canon S1 IS was either a 4 or a 5 MP would you have chosen that
or still would have chosen the Z20?

That would depend! The AA batteries, swivel finder, and CF card would be
in its favour. The sensor size would need to increase, so the overall
weight and bulk would increase. After that, picture quality would need to
be as good as the FZ20. Finally, I'd need to try operating the camera
with gloved hands.

But it might win, yes! Not purely with a sensor change, though.

Cheers,
David

Are there any sites where I can submit the photographs and get other peoples
opinions on the quality? Maybe I'm too picky but I have taken some quite
nice sharp pictures with the camera at shorter distances. But my primary
interest is landscapes so I'm a bit disappointed.


www.pbase.com will do

Have you tried running it through NeatImage ? I've been playing with
it for the last few days and on some pictures if does amzing things.

Are there any sites where I can submit the photographs and get other peoples
opinions on the quality? Maybe I'm too picky but I have taken some quite
nice sharp pictures with the camera at shorter distances. But my primary
interest is landscapes so I'm a bit disappointed.


www.pbase.com will do

Have you tried running it through NeatImage ? I've been playing with
it for the last few days and on some pictures if does amzing things.

Do you mean 30% linearly? That is, 30% horizontally and vertically? In
that case you are cutting scene from 3 Megapixels to about 300,000
pixels. I would expect it to be blurry. A 3MP camera gives SOME room
for croppping but not a whole lot. About 70% of original (in each
direction) is all. Remember, the linear cropping percentage must be
SQUARED to figure how many pixels you are left with.

Even if you are talking about cropping to 30% by area, you are down to 1
megapixel, which isn't all that great.

!p^&c88%B! wrote:
I'm pretty new to photography in general and have recently bought a Canon
Powershot S1 IS (at the suggestion of people in this group, I should add).
In general everything works well, although a bit slowly. I've installed the
new firmware upgrade.

However I am having one significant problem. Although the autofocus works
well and the pictures are sharp if the subject is relatively close, when I
shoot using the zoom at long distances, the pictures (particularly if I crop
them) are blurry and lack detail. I'm using the full 3.2 mb setting and I
am only cropping down to about 30 per cent of the original. So I think
(maybe not?) there should be plenty of sharpness and detail left.

I'm not sure whether it's the lens at big zoom settings (10X) or the focus
at long distance is incorrect or could it be something else? I'm hoping
someone can sort of point me in the right direction. Maybe others with
Canon's can comment if they have similar problems.

Thanks,
Perry.

!p^&c88%B! wrote:

I'm pretty new to photography in general and have recently bought a Canon
Powershot S1 IS (at the suggestion of people in this group, I should add).
In general everything works well, although a bit slowly. I've installed the
new firmware upgrade.

However I am having one significant problem. Although the autofocus works
well and the pictures are sharp if the subject is relatively close, when I
shoot using the zoom at long distances, the pictures (particularly if I crop
them) are blurry and lack detail. I'm using the full 3.2 mb setting and I
am only cropping down to about 30 per cent of the original. So I think
(maybe not?) there should be plenty of sharpness and detail left.

I'm not sure whether it's the lens at big zoom settings (10X) or the focus
at long distance is incorrect or could it be something else? I'm hoping
someone can sort of point me in the right direction. Maybe others with
Canon's can comment if they have similar problems.

Thanks,
Perry.



I've had one of these for two weeks now. I'm very happy with it. I did
experiment with resolution quality between normal and full optical zoom
and found that the only way to get equally sharp images was to use a
tripod. I suggest turn off IS when using a tripod because the automatic
IS can take several seconds to full stabilize, and even if your camera
is perfectly still the image will be moving due to the IS lag.

When not using a tripod I found the best way to reduce camera shake is
the turn IS on and use the 2 sec timer. That way you can focus on
holding the camera still when the image is captured.

The main difference in image quality between full zoomed images is the
purple fringe effect gets worse.