HS10 Review Part 16 – At Middle Distance

This camera lends itself to sitting around and shooting everything nearby. Subjects at 20 or 30 feet are well within the reach of this lens. So here are some images shot at approximately 30 feet. Let’s see how well it retains detail. I will also compare it with the F70EXR in a few cases.

First, a shot across my pool of some sort of weird pool toy made of colored foam. The back lighting allow there to be a fair bit of shadow behind it, which will make for interesting crops.

Note the sun blasting off the stained concrete. The image is well balanced for light, so the compensation I was shooting with, –0.67EV, was able to hold the bright spots very well.

HS10

If you click through, you can see that the details are pretty well rendered in there. The branches on the right hand crop who a little texture and the foam is very crisp.

F70EXR

I get the sense of a tad more detail in the crops here, but is is not enough to get excited over. At web sizes, the images look very similar. Of course, I could have zoomed all the way to 720mm for a closer look, but this composition called for 270mm. Not every shot demands the telescope.

I turned to those Hydrangea blooms from last year. Backlit, which poises a bit of a challenge for a sensor and jpeg engine that sometimes take hold of an image and mush it up, so to speak. This one is shot at the full zoom and I quite like this rendering.

These crops show good detail at 100% and very nice bokeh.

The following series perfectly illustrates two things: (1) That the HS10 sensor has got significantly less dynamic range to handle highlights. And (2) that the extra resolution of the HS10 makes a difference when cropping.

HS10 – watch for the burnt out concrete.

 

F70EXR – note that the detail in the crop is upsized to match the HS10, and remains harder to read.

And, of course, if you really want to read the label, just zoom in to the max with the HS10. It still cannot hold the highlights on the concrete, but that’s not the point of this particular shot.

Can’t argue with that :-)

The final series in this middle distance set of shots is a zoomed out shot of the back yard. It is early spring, so there is little in the way of foliage. My neighbor’s large Blue Spruce dominates the landscape.

HS10

F70EXR

Again, we see a slight difference in the background sections. The HS10 comes off a bit mushy when looking at the crops. But for general purpose use, this level of mush does not cause much difficult. On the other hand, were you trying to crop some detail in the darker sections, the EXR sensor would be a bit crisper than the HS10 as it has been throughout these tests.