new camera, part 2

My previous camera, which I loved, took some serious abuse on my cross-country motorcycle trip last year: Hanging out in the breeze for 10,000 miles (16,000km), subject to dust, dirt, road grit, temperature extremes, etc., the camera certainly saw severe service.

I recently got an Olympus SP 570uz, which some online sites are offering at about half list price. (A small silver lining to the recession; electronics prices are in near free fall.)

Lots of nice features, but the one that most appealed to me was the enormous zoom capability, 26mm wide angle to 520mm telephoto. The first 20x is purely-optical zoom (no image degradation at all), plus another 5x digital zoom on top of that, for a total of 100x zoom. It's a freaking telescope!

The camera is about the size of a standard SLR, and is totally self-contained. This means I'll have a huge range of effective lens options without having to carry a bag full of heavy, expensive and delicate glass lenses with me.

I'm still learning what it can do. Although it has a point-and-shoot mode, it'd be silly to use the camera that way. So, I'm experimenting.

Here, I was playing with the zoom. I started out with a very wide-angle (100 degree wide) shot, centered on the top of the distant tree across the field:

(as always, click for larger views of the photos)

Start with the optical zoom, still focused on the very top of that tree:


Closer:


closer still:


And here, I'm approaching the end of the optical zoom:


I was holding the camera and bracing against a railing. The camera's image-stabilization system was no doubt working overtime to steady the shots at these magnifications. But there's still a little motion-blur evident, so I'll really need to use a tripod at high zooms like these.


Into the first increment of digital zoom. There's a little artefacting from the pixel enlargement and hand-held shakiness, but it's still OK:


Holy smokes, this is getting extreme. Even this half-assed first attempt at extreme zoom is picking out individual needles atop the tree:


And here we are at 100x zoom. Getting fuzzy, but you can still count the scales on the pine cones. (And remember, even in the larger Blogger format, this photo has been hugely reduced in resolution from the original.)


Wow.

Here's the original wide-angle shot with the 100x zoom inset, so you can see just how much magnification the camera can handle:


This camera's gonna be fun. ;-)