Accurate Image Manipulation for Desktop Publishing
Digicams

The Olympus 400z was my first digicam, then I had the Casio 3500ex fo a shot while, both were horribly poor quality gadgets. I now have the Canon D60. At work I use the Canon D2000 and 1DmkII digital cameras.

Click the thumbnail to see the original Casio QV3500EX image.
Click the thumbnail to see the the corrected image in larger size.

Links to Digicam Resources

Review Sites

The review sites depend heavily on the manufacturers & advertisers so they can not actually criticize the gadgets, every new digicam is said to be much better than the previous one, if not excellent one after another, and the authors are never able to find out e.g. the large tonal and color errors nor the high noise. Here is a well balanced article about the current state of digital photography.

The digicams that camera manufacturers provide for the review sites can possibly be selected devices with e.g. much lesser noise level than the model typically has.

Digital Photography Review (DPR) provides very good evaluation reports. News are fresh, lots of info.

At DPR all the intermediate "sample" images are downsampled AND edited, be aware of this. Much better way to present a smaller image area would be to show a cropped portion from the real camera images with absolutely no image editing. Now as it is one must always download the full image in order to see the real camera performance.

DPR calibrate their monitors gamma 2.2 be aware of this. They shows a 26 patch grayswatch (at the bottom of this page) as a calibration tool. On gamma 2.2 calibrated system this swatch is strongly non-uniform, the difference between the A and B steps is minimal, Y and Z patches appear as pure black, strongest visual significance is seen in the range from Q patch to W patch. This swatch suffers from the slew rate and stabilizing time problems of CRT monitors that strongly accentuates the edge/change between the steps giving the illusion that there would be such a difference also between the actual surfaces of the patches.

In case your computer is not calibrated to gamma 2.2 using AdobeGamma utility, Color Vision OptiCal or similar monitor calibration software/hardware your gamma space is 2.5 in case of a Windows system (and 1.72 in case of Mac system). This means that on Windows system you see the images somewhat darker than how the DPReview people see them (and on Mac you see them a great deal lighter).

Normal uncalibrated PC systems all have gamma 2.5 space, there DPR graywedge is even more uniform. In any case do not adjust your monitor in such way that you discern all the steps in the DPR grayscale, it will be a very incorrect setting with way too high blackpoint.

 


Sample photos are real camera shots. News are fresh, lot of info.

 

Online Digital Photography Magazine.
 

Monthly Digital Still Camera Web Magazine.
   
 
Dedicated to outdoor photography using professional digital cameras.
     
 

Digital camera views (DCVIEWS) Digital imaging portal. Specifications, information, up-to-date news, reviews, hints & tips, Q&A, value added links, tools collection, online tutorials on photography.
     

Accurate Image Manipulation for Desktop Publishing

Copyright Timo Autiokari, 1999-2007. Contact info