Digital camera examples

Examples of pictures taken with a digital camera

The Olympus Camedia C 1400 L takes pictures at three resolutions. For each of these resolutions I took two photographs in a garden. These were taken on a fairly sunny day in the summer using a tripod to maximise the quality. The first is a mid-zoom picture of the garden and the second a macro closeup of a flower. Additionally I expanded part of the first image to show the relative loss of detail from the various modes.
From these it is possible to see that highest quality is achieved by using the camera's best setting 'SHQ'. However since these images are approximately twice the size of those taken in the High Quality 'HQ' mode with very little difference in the final image that setting probably offers a better compromise for everyday use.
The lowest quality mode takes pictures at a lower resolution (640x512). This is clearly not so well defined. Where the final pictures are destined for the web without much post-processing, this is probably acceptable quality and does offer a lot of pictures per simm. However my experiences would suggest that taking and manipulating photographs at the highest resolution possible and then reducing the resolution as the last stage gives better overall results.

Mode

Resolution

Typical
File size

Garden
view

Macro

Expanded
image

Super High Quality
(SHQ)

1280 x 1024
16 Million Colours
3.7 MBytes

900 KBytes

High Quality
(HQ)

1280 x 1024
16 Million Colours
3.7 MBytes

300 KBytes

Standard Quality
(SQ)

640 x 512
16 Million Colours
960 KBytes

75 KBytes

Note These images were stored using JPEG compression in the camera. I have not compresed any of the images further to enable a fair comparison to be made. The effect of JPG compression would be to remove some detail from the image.