Canon S2 IS or Panasonic FX30??? Help!!

[E.T]

Fahad wrote:

And in my humble opinion if you are take snaps at night outside or in low light then you will need higher ISO.

If you're talking about real night you can't have high enough ISO.
But in cities there's not real nights because of that excessive light pollution... and then image stabilization can help more than noisy/watercolor filtered high ISOs, IS can work better than even high ISO DSLR.
(unless you photograph moving objects)

High ISO settings are used to achieve higher shutter speeds either to freeze action or prevent camera shake in hand-help photography. The Konica-Minolta A2 has an Anti-Shake system which reduces camera shake. It turns out that the anti-shake system works exceptionally well. So well that in cases where ISO 1600 does not allow a sufficiently fast shutter speed for hand-held photography with the 20D, the A2 managed to produce quite sharp and noise-free pictures using only ISO 200.
http://www.neocamera.com/feature_dslr4.html



grimmts wrote:

I also take a lot of photos of sunsets.

That's weak spot of ultrazooms.
(except Samsung 815 with its 28-420mm zoom)

Just as example I took this with 28mm+0.8x converter. (~22.5mm)

For getting 38mm field of view take away 1/3rd from width and height, much over half of pictures area!
Those 35-36mm aren't much wider than that.
(28mm is ~1/6th narrower compared to photo)



Unless you're doing really big prints and considerable cropping 5MP is quite enough. Also remember that the more they put megapixels to sensor the worser the noise becomes.
As rule of thumb for very, very high quality print size maximum divide camera's output resolution with 250, that gives size in inches.


rduve wrote:

Both have excellent picture quality, and I am sure the Canon ultrazoom models compare closely to the G5.

Not true, for most manufacturers these long tele ultrazooms aren't top of the line cameras so their optical quality isn't top quality, ultrazooms have more things like chromatic aberration/purple fringing, loosing of sharpness at extreme ends of zoom range, same for maximum apertures. Good quality long zoom lens would be considerably costlier than what they can afford to put into normal priced ultrazooms.

Only Panasonic (and now Samsung with their 815) has long tele ultrazoom as their top of the line (non-SLR) camera.

[grimmts]

E.T wrote:

Fahad wrote:
Only Panasonic (and now Samsung with their 815) has long tele ultrazoom as their top of the line (non-SLR) camera.

Yeah, I was impressed that Panasonic has a Leica lens. I couldn't find information on the Samsung. How many megapixels is it?

Thanks!

[Ivan Karamasov]

Samsung 815 has 8MP resolution as well.
I tried it out once in a shop and I was not at all content with it's ergonomics and abilities. It is pretty heavy and the extending lens IMO looks extremely ridiculous at full tele. It reminded me on pinocchio or even worse....
Noise levels are even higher than with the panasonic fz30 and autofocus is slower.
The only thing I like about it is its 28mm wide-angle.

I guess Samsung wanted a little too much in this case. They tried to top the competition in almost every respect (more zoom, bigger lcd, more lcds etc.) and ended up with a lot of compromises. DIstortion levels are pretty high at wideangle and at telefoto there is quite a remarkable corner softness. Also there is no imagestabilization so if you want to prevent camera movement you will have to boost ISO-sensitivity and thus gaining very noisy images.
I think you better go with something else.
greetings
ivan

PS: I just remembered this interesting page, where you can directly compare alle the mentioned models. Lets just start with a comparison of fz30 and Pro815. I think the result is rather evident.

http://www.lesnumeriques.com/duels.p...=746&ph=20

[rduve]

Yeah, Ivan. Thanks, that's wwhat I figured/

[grimmts]

Thanks for the web link Ivan. I can't read French, but it was great to be able to compare photos taken with the Panasonic FZ30 and the Canon S2 IS. The Panasonic outperformed the Canon in those pix all except for the video. Hmmmm, so now I'm more confused than ever....LOL

Without image stabilization, the Samsung is not as attractive to me. Thanks for pointing that out.

Would love to hear from more people who use the Panasonic FX30 as a point and shoot (automatic settings).

Thanks!

[grimmts]

Ivan Karamasov wrote:

I just remembered this interesting page, where you can directly compare alle the mentioned models. Lets just start with a comparison of fz30 and Pro815. I think the result is rather evident.

http://www.lesnumeriques.com/duels.p...=746&ph=20

Yes, the results are quite clear. Can you tell me if the Panasonic images were taken with automatic settings or manually?

Thanks for your help.

[Ivan Karamasov]

Unfortunately not. I couldn't find any information about the test setttings. Now that you speak of it, i 'd really like to know as well. I guess that they do not set everything manually as there are some images that are way underexposed (e.g. "faible éclairage" by canon s2is) which should not be possible if they allways used the same manual settings.

Anyway, if you want to use your camera mainly in full auto or P-mode, I would rather recommend Canon s2is or even better sony h1 (if you can live without flip & twist lcd). The latter is very easy to control and I got the impression that it is also a little less noisy than canon s2is or panasonic fz5 and fz30. The pictures that come right out of the camera are very pleasing and do not need much fine tuning.
You also get it cheaper than the other models, save fz5. At least that's the situation in Europe (fz30 costs about 100 Euros more than the canon and almost 200 Euros more than the sony).

If you want to have a closer look to the h1 in direct comparison to canon's s2is, check out this test-shootout at

http://www.dcresource.com/specials/S2_vs_H1/index.shtml

c.u.
ivan