Wednesday, April 7, 2010

F80EXR: Stabilization algorithm has changed!

Wow … Fuji snuck in a major change to the stabilization algorithm in the F80EXR. For those of you who noticed that my initial truncated ISO ladder was kind of wrecked by the inability to get a clear shot at 1.5s from a tripod, the answer is now apparent.

The experiment I ran was simple … three attempts at 100 ISO in rather low light (filtered daylight that was 1.5 stops less bright than last night’s artificial light.) All triggered by self-timer with 5 second exposures and all miserable failures.

Two attempts with IS switched off and they came out perfectly.

I then tried the F70EXR and did one attempt of each and both were good. No problems. Note, though, that the IS ON image showed slight softening, but not enough to affect a web sized image at all.

Sheesh … I *really* hope that Fuji’s tweaks to the algorithm have made it more effective. So far I am finding that to be plausible, but we shall see.

IS_test_crops[1]

Bottom line … the  IS system now behaves like typical older-generation lens-based OIS systems. Switch IS off when shooting from tripod.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Any idea why there's a blurring with the Image Stabilization on, and the camera is on a tripod?

It's totally counter-intuitive and I can't think of an explanation for it.

Kim Letkeman said...

Some stabilization algorithms operate whether the camera is steady or not. Which means that sometimes they induce a bit of unsteadiness where there was none originally. Nikon and others document in their manuals when the stabilization must be switched off on a tripod. I think Fuji introduced more twitchyness in their newer IS algorithms ... no idea why.