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| Camera | Sony DSC-F828 |
| Exposure Mode | auto |
| Focal Length | 51.0mm |
| Aperture | f/2.0 |
| Exposure | 1/30 sec. |
| ISO Speed | 64 |
| Flash | off |
When we bought our first digital camera we wanted it to replace both the point-and-shoot film cameras we both owned as well as having a reasonable zoom to allow us to take a wider range of photos. As you already know we bought the Sony DSC-F828 which is capable of being used to take some brilliant photos. I have, however, always been more than a little annoyed about the marketing description of the zoom feature. The camera has a x7 optical zoom which, at the time we bought camera, was about as good as you could get without buying a full blown DSLR and paying a lot for a telephoto lens. As well as the optical zoom the camera has a digital zoom that was advertised as "up to x35". This actually comes in two varieties; precision and smart. The precision zoom is a x2 multiplier giving a very good quality x14 zoom. The smart zoom, on the other hand, is almost useless. It doesn't actually zoom the image as such, it is more like a crop. Basically it crops a section from the middle of the image and then scales it up to the selected image size. So you can only get the advertised x35 zoom (actually x36 as it is a x5.1 modifier on the x7 optical zoom) if you are willing to drop the recorded image down from 8 megapixels (3264x2448) to VGA (just 640x480 pixels). You can get exactly the same effect (sometimes even better) by taking a photo with the precision zoom and then cropping it on the computer. The problem is that with such few pixels the image is very blocky and the photos certainly aren't worth printing. So apart from a few brief experiments when we first got the camera I have never used the smart zoom function and have always felt a little cheated.
Sony do sell a number of accessories for the DSC-F828, including an improved macro lens and an ND filter which attach to the end of the existing lens, but nothing that would give me a useful zoom above x14. I'd never really thought about seeing if anyone else made accessories for the camera until a few weeks ago, at which point I came across the Raynox range of high definition lenses. Whilst they make lots of lenses and adaptors their site allows you to easily list all the products that are compatible with a given camera, for example the Sony DSC-F828! They make a number of telephoto lens adapters that would fit my camera but I've bought the DCR-2025PRO which gives me a x2.2 multiplier and with the full optical and precision zoom of the camera gives me x30. Finally the ability to zoom in and still take high quality images.
Even before I'd tried to take any photos I was impressed. The lens is a solid chunk of glass and metal that feels well built. It comes with a huge lens shade, carry bag and adapter rings allowing it to be used with a number of different cameras. I've had the lens for less than a week and so haven't had much of a chance to play with it yet, but I did take a bunch of comparison images from my study window to get an idea of just how good it is.
Reading left to right and top to bottom, we have firstly just the x7 optical zoom of the camera. In theory this will be the highest quality image of the four as it doesn't involve any digital zoom, but as you can see I can't get that close to the Long Tailed Tits on the feeders. The second image is x14, which is the optical zoom boosted by the x2 precision digital zoom. Image quality is still high but I'm also still a long way away from the birds. The third image shows the new Raynox DCR-2025PRO in use. The camera still reports a x14 zoom as it doesn't know about the lens adapter but it is really x30. This is the best of the four images; good optics and a precision digital zoom giving an image I can print and use. The final image shows the smart x36 zoom. As you can see, whilst I can get a lot closer to the birds the quality of the image is very low. I have tried printing a few of these images in the past and they are so poor it really isn't worth the money. There are of course two other combinations that I haven't shown. First I could have a x15 zoom by using just the camera's optical zoom and the DCR-2025PRO, but this doesn't give images that are much better than those achieved using the precision zoom and they suffer from quite serious vignetting because of the length of the lens. The other option would be to use the DCR-2025PRO with the smart zoom which would give me almost x80 zoom, but low image quality. I suppose this might be useful for photographing very small things at a great distance but I can't imagine that I'll use this option much given that I can achieve the same thing by cropping and scaling the high quality x30 photos.One problem with such large zoom levels is camera shake. The higher the zoom the more any slight movement shows up in the final image. I don't own a tripod that will hold the weight of the camera (especially not with the extra 275g of lens attached) so I took the shots resting the lens on the window frame and trying to hold the camera as still as possible (the next photography related investment is going to have to be a decent tripod!). I still needed quite a fast shutter speed to get sharp images so I have done some minor work on this weeks photo. Using Paint Shop Pro I adjusted the white balance, used the default smart photo fix settings and then applied the one step noise removal. The final step was to crop the image down to just the section I wanted.
So while this weeks photo was nothing special, I'm hoping that in future I'll be able to take some more impressive wildlife photos that I can then blog about.
2 comments:
I wish we had Long-tailed Tits in the garden! I've never managed any sort of photo of them apart from an unrecognisable blob at Leighton Moss!
It is nice having them visit the garden, although of course they didn't make an appearance this morning during the hour we spent doing the Big Garden Birdwatch.
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