(Click on image or link to view full size image)

carblack_olyD580.jpg

This picture was taken with the Olympus D580 digital camera during a car exhibition. Overall, the picture looks great. However, I noticed in the region marked by the red rectangle that the body of the car is peppered with specks of strange colored spots. If you look at other parts of the picture, you will find these noise there too. These spots were definitely not present when taking the picture. The camera was set to auto mode when taking this picture, and the settings are: aperture size = f3.4, shutter speed = 1/40 sec, and ISO rating of 334. The reason for the noise is due to the higher ISO rating used, because higher ISO rating means faster sensitivity to light, and therefore a potentially noisier picture.

There also appears to be some color distortion in the region marked by the green rectangle. The bonnet of the black car did not look so yellowish when I took the picture, although the light above was brighly lit. This color distortion could be introduced by the camera image processing algorithms.

Below is another picture of the back of a red ferrari taken with the same camera. I was disappointed with this picture because the body of the car is peppered with lots of noise. The picture was taken with setting of aperture size of f4.4, shutter speed = 1/60 sec, and ISO rating of 400. Again the camera chose the ISO rating of 400 and longer exposure to take this picture, and this could be the reason for the noise.

Another Picture of a Red Ferrari (Click on image or link to view full size image)

carferrari_noise_olyD580.jpg

From the above two pictures, we can see that in some situations, the camera auto mode makes bad decisions on the settings used to take pictures. There was nothing special about the scene for the two pictures, and the lighting conditions were quite normal. Thus, there is still some room for improvement for this camera when dealing with such situations.