Zoom! Zoom! Zoom! New camera: Canon S2 IS Digicam - 12x Megazoom digital camera with image stabilization
Woo hoo! I bought a new digital camera. I don’t have it yet; FedEx does. But I held one last week at Fry’s. I’ll write more about it here when I get to play with it some.
I got it for the zoom. I knew I needed more zoom than my 3x Kodak DC290, but I didn’t really appreciate what a zoom could do until I marveled over this site of hummingbird pictures. In particular the last picture where she puts a penny in the nest and it’s as big as the birds were. Then she explains that her “wonderful 12x zoom lens, managed to reach into that jungle and retrieve these images without creating too much stress for Mom and the babies.” She took all these photos from a distance? O-M-F-G!
I went shopping (again) for a 12x zoom after that, and I found some sample pictures over at Steves-Digicams. (By the way — I always do comparison shopping at Steve’s. It’s an amazing site with complete details on every digital camera on the market.)
Let me start by saying that I like to “crop zoom”, otherwise known as “digital zooming” in software after the photo is taken. Here are some images with 12x crop zooming and 12x optical zooming that I manipulated from Steve’s site.
First, the thumbnail:
See the little sailboats in the distance? Those white specs? Ok… Here’s the detail shot “crop zoomed” at 100% on those boats. That is, this is a detail from the original image at full resolution. (This image is about 12x more zoomed than the thumbnail above.) Pretty good optics, I’d say. But this is a web-photo, and details are more important in print.
In that 100% sized “zoomed in” photo I can see that one of the boats clearly has a name on the stern. It looks like “Tom Green” to me. But I can’t read it. If I digitally zoom 12x more and clean up a bit… well, I still can’t read it.
Now here’s the same image but optically zoomed 12x using the camera and shrunk to a thumbnail:
And here is the name of that boat at 12x optical zooming, 100% sized:
Now, purely for comparison’s sake, let’s take the detail and crop-zoom it another 12x.
You can see the pixelization here, and you can see how smooth it is.
[Edit: Previous edition of this entry had 3x images instead of 12x, and used a different boat for comparison.]
