We've begun including links in our reviews to a Thumber-generated index page for our test shots.
The Thumber data includes a host of information on the images, including
shutter speed, ISO setting, compression setting, etc. Rather than clutter
the page below with *all* that detail, we're posting the Thumber index so
only those interested in the information need wade through it!
;)
Note on Exposure Info for the Sony MVC-FD91 test images:
We normally include exposure information for all our test shots, extracted
from the JPEG file headers by Max Lyon's excellent "Thumber" program. In
the case of the FD91 (and some other Sony cameras) though, the required
information apparently isn't stored in the file headers in the first
place. Thus, none of the images below have any of the usual shutter
speed/aperture information associated with them. Sorry!
:-(
Outdoor portrait:
(316k)
This is a tough shot for many digicams, due to the extreme tonal range
of the image (which is why we set it up this way). The trick is to hold
highlight and shadow detail without producing a "flat" picture with muddy
colors and the Sony MVC-FD95 did a very commendable job. We shot this
image using the daylight (316k), automatic (315k) and manual (315k) white balance
settings. Both daylight and automatic settings seemed a little too cool
(daylight more so than automatic) and the color balance wasn't quite right.
Therefore, we chose the manual setting for our main series, based on the
more accurate white and color balance throughout. Color balance looks
good for the most part, although the blue flowers and pants seem slightly
muted. Resolution and detail look reasonably sharp, showing just a little
softness (we usually look at the leaves next to the model's shirt and
in the details around the face). The 12-bit digitization of the FD-95
shows in the exceptional job it does of holding delicate gradations in
the strong highlights of the model's shirt. Detail looks great in the
shadow areas too, with only a slight amount of noise. For our main image,
we chose a +0.3 EV exposure adjustment to get the best exposure on the
model's face without blowing the highlight areas too much. The table below
shows the results of a range of exposure settings from zero to +1.3 EV.
Closer
portrait: (322k) The MVC-FD95 does
a very nice job with this "portrait" shot, thanks to its 10x optical zoom
lens. (The availability of longer focal lengths is a key feature if you're
going to be shooting close-up people pictures.) As with the Outdoor
Portrait, we shot in the manual white balance mode. Our main shot (322k) required
only a +0.3 EV adjustment to achieve a good exposure on the face and in
the highlight areas. Resolution and detail look much sharper in this
close-up shot, particularly in the strands of the model's hair. There's
still a tiny amount of noise in the shadow areas, but overall, the image
looks fabulous. The table below shows the results of a range of exposure
settings from zero to +1.3 EV.
Indoor portrait, flash: For
our first series of shots, we used the camera's popup flash in Automatic
Exposure mode and set the intensity level to low (334k) normal (316k) and high (317k). The shots were
well illuminated by the camera's flash, but each had slightly bluish and
magenta casts, due to the mismatch between the daylight-balance strobe and
the very warm cast of the incandescent room lighting. The best of these
exposures was achieved at the normal flash intensity level. Next, we
switched the camera to Twilight Plus mode and shot with the popup flash at
the low (334k) normal (316k) and high (331k) intensity levels.
While these exposures seemed to be allowing a little more ambient light
in, they still have very blue shadow areas and very magenta highlights.
Color balance is slightly better than in Automatic Exposure mode, but all
of the images are a little too dark (even with the flash on the high
setting). Then we shot again in Twilight Plus mode, with the flash at
normal intensity, but boosted the exposure compensation to +0.7 EV,
producing this (331k)
slightly better exposed image. Although the color balance is still a
little off, the overall lighting appears more balanced, and the color
mismatch between the flash and room lighting isn't as strongly
evident.
Next, we decided to take advantage of the camera's
external flash connection. Staying in the Twilight Plus exposure mode, we
connected an external flash unit and bounced it from the ceiling in the normal (329k) and high (322k) intensity
settings. The resulting images had much softer lighting (none of those
harsh shadows on the wall) but the magenta color cast remained. Of the
two, the high intensity setting seems to be the better exposure. Finally,
we switched back to Automatic Exposure mode and again bounced the external
flash off of the ceiling (at high intensity) and tried shooting with the
automatic (332k) and daylight (331k) white
balance settings. The automatic setting produced a slightly dark exposure
with that same magenta cast, but the lighting is much softer.
Interestingly enough, the daylight setting produced a little better
exposure, although still dark, but without the magenta tinge. (We were a
little surprised at this outcome, as we expected the daylight white
balance to produce a very yellow image).
Indoor
portrait, no flash: (310k) This
shot is always a very tough test of a camera's white balance capability,
given the strong, yellowish color cast of the household incandescent bulbs
used for the lighting, and the MVC-FD95's white balance system did a
pretty good job with this difficult light source. We shot with the automatic (311k), manual (320k) and incandescent (322k) white
balance settings, choosing the manual setting for our main series because
of its much-improved accuracy. The automatic setting resulted in a very
magenta image while the incandescent setting appeared a little too warm.
(In the white-balance examples, we used a +1.0 EV exposure adjustment. The
picture really required more than that, but we didn't realize this until
the shooting session was over, and discovered that we hadn't shot an auto
white balance image with greater exposure compensation. We thus showed the
+1 EV samples to provide a consistent basis of comparison.) We achieved
the best results with the camera's Twilight Plus exposure mode, which did
a nice job of brightening the color throughout the image. The table below
shows a range of exposure compensation settings from zero to +2.0 in the
both the Automatic and Twilight Plus exposure modes with manual white
balance in both cases.
House
shot: (313k) NOTE that this is the
"new" house shot, a much higher-resolution poster than we first used in
our tests. To compare the image of the MVC-FD95 with previously tested
cameras, here's a shot of the original house poster, captured with the automatic (332k) white balance
settings.
In this shot, we chose the automatic (37k) white balance
setting for our main series, as the color balance appeared the most
accurate overall. We also shot with the daylight (37k) setting, which
produced slightly warm results, and the manual
(37k) setting, which looked nearly identical to the
automatic setting. Resolution and detail look good throughout the image,
especially in the brick and shingle areas, as well as in the shrubbery and
tree limbs, although the image is overall a bit softer than the best of
the 2 megapixel cameras we've tested. Compared to the original FD-91
Mavica though, it's a huge improvement, while maintaining most of the
exceptional zoom range that model had. Noise is very subtle, barely even
noticeable, mostly visible in the shingles. We picked up only a small halo
effect around light and dark edges, so the in-camera sharpening is set
just about right. (We'd have gone just a bit lighter with it, but it's
pretty good as cameras go, better than some highly touted models.)The table below shows the full range of resolution and quality
settings for the MVC-FD95.
We
also shot with the MVC-FD95's adjustable sharpness setting, which allows
you to set the sharpness level from -2 to +2 (a total of five levels). The
settings are awfully subtle in their effect, to the point that we had a
little trouble deciding which image was which, the changes seemed so
minute. There's definitely a difference between the softest and hardest
settings though. Actually, the subtlety of the sharpness variation is
good, in that we found the results were much better than we could achieve
in Photoshop(tm): When we tried to apply our normal hard/tight sharpening
in Photoshop, we found that it mostly accentuated the JPEG artifacts,
rather than subject detail. Since the in-camera sharpening is applied
prior to the JPEG compression, it avoids this difficulty. Here's the range
of settings:
Far-Field
Test (314k) This image is shot at infinity
to test far-field lens performance. NOTE that this image cannot be
directly compared to the other "house" shot, which is a poster, shot in
the studio. The rendering of detail in the poster will be very different
than in this shot, and color values (and even the presence or absence of
leaves on the trees!) will vary in this subject as the seasons progress.
In general though, you can evaluate detail in the bricks, shingles and
window detail, and in the tree branches against the sky. Compression
artifacts are most likely to show in the trim along the edge of the roof,
in the bricks, or in the relatively "flat" areas in the
windows.
The MVC-FD95 performs very well in this shot, which is the
strongest test of detail of any we do, as well as the harshest contrast
challenge we throw at the cameras (the bright white of the central bay
window often tricks digicams into losing detail in that area). Although
the bay window is partially in shade (we were dodging clouds a lot the day
we shot these, so they're taken a bit later in the day than normal), you
can still see quite a bit of detail in the sunny portions, meaning that
the MVC-FD95 handled the bright white highlights unusually well. (As we've
said before, thanks no doubt to the 12-bit digitization.) We shot with the
daylight (37k), manual (40k) and automatic (40k) white balance
settings, choosing automatic for our main series because it had the most
accurate white value. Daylight and manual came pretty close, but both were
off just a little (daylight a shade too cool and manual a shade too warm).
Color balance and saturation look nice overall, although the grass maybe
wasn't quite that green. (Dave only wishes. ;-) Resolution and detail also
look good, with a tiny amount of noise visible in the telltale shingles.
Overall, an excellent job with good resolution and excellent handling of
the difficult highlight areas. The table below shows the full
resolution/quality series with the automatic white balance
setting.
Lens Zoom Range We've
received a number of requests from readers to take shots showing the lens
focal length range of those cameras with zoom lenses. Thus, we're happy to
present you here with the following series of shots, showing the field of
view with the lens at full wide-angle, the lens at full 10x telephoto and
the lens at full telephoto with 2x digital telephoto enabled.
Zoom
range is one of the big stories of the MVC-FD95: Its 10x zoom is a longer
ratio than any other digicam on the market, save only it's predecessor the
FD91 (which had a 14x optical zoom, although only an 800K pixel sensor.)
If you've only been exposed to the 3x zooms typical on most digicams, you
literally won't believe your eyes when you look through the FD95's
viewfinder and hit the zoom button! Its ability to reach *way* out to get
the subject combines with its 2 megapixel resolution to deliver more
pixels on distant subjects than any other digicam out there. If you're a
nature or sports photo buff, and commonly find yourself wishing you could
get closer to your subjects, the FD95 is a camera we can recommend without
qualification! On this test, we found the images to be sharp and clear
(although we've chosen to show only the small-size images here to make
downloads faster). The lens does show a fair bit of barrel distortion on
the wide angle shot, but really captures a nice wide area. The 10x optical
zoom gets you incredibly close-in and the 2x digital telephoto gets even
closer while maintaining good resolution. (At least in this small-mode
image: At larger sizes, the image would be interpolated and consequently
less sharp.) Overall, an incredible performance!
Musicians
Poster (328k) As with the House shot, we
shot samples of this image using the automatic
(40k), manual (40k) and daylight (40k) white balance options. We chose the daylight setting
because we felt it produced the most accurate skin tones and overall color
balance, while automatic produced very cool results and manual was just
slightly cooler than daylight. (The heavy amount of blue in the image is
often tricky for digicams to adjust for.) Color saturation looks about
right in the model's blue robe, as well as in the red of the blonde
model's vest. The skin tones also look good throughout. Resolution and
detail are reasonably crisp, with great detail in the bird wings and
silver threads of the blue robe as well as in the flower garland and
beaded necklaces. We caught a moderate level of noise in the image, some
of which may be coming from the poster. Below is our standard
resolution/quality series in the daylight white balance
setting.
Macro Shot (317k) The MVC-FD95 performs superbly in the macro
category, capturing a minimum area of 2.12 x 1.59 inches (53.95 x 40.46
mm) at the furthest wide angle (335k) setting. The lens does seem to have a bit of a "sweet
spot" in macro mode, allowing you to partially zoom in and capture an even
smaller minimum area of only 1.42 x 1.06 inches (35.96 x 26.97mm). We
chose this for our main shot,(317k) since it seems to be as close as we can get.
Excellent detail and resolution. The lighting is a bit odd here, due to
the close proximity of the lens to the subject, which blocks some of the
light and forced a very shallow lighting angle. For this same
reason, we could not use the flash with this test as the large lens would
block the light. Ultra-macro optics usually show some optical
imperfections this close, and the FD-95's lens is no exception. Still, the
level of distortion seems to be less than we've come to expect, with some
barrel distortion, curvature of field and lens flare in the corners all
present, but not as severe as we've seen in some other ultra-macro
lenses.
"Davebox"
Test Target (324k) The MVC-FD95 again
performs well in this test category, although some of the colors appear a
little weak. We shot with the daylight (324k), manual (324k) and automatic (324k) white balance settings, choosing the automatic
setting for our main series as it produced the best looking white value
(we judge mainly by white of the small resolution target). Daylight
produced a very warm cast and the manual setting looked identical to the
automatic. The large cyan, magenta and yellow color blocks on the left
side of the target look pretty good, although just slightly muted (as do
several of the other color blocks). The MVC-FD95 isn't fooled by the red
and magenta color blocks on the middle, horizontal color chart and
separates them nicely (we've seen many digicams get confused in this area
and try to blend the colors into one). The subtle tonal variations in the
"B" pastel range of the Q60 chart are just barely distinguishable (a good
result as some digicams do not pick up the differences). There's a fair
amount of detail in the shadow area of the briquettes, and only a small
amount of noise. Overall, a very nice performance. Below is our standard
resolution and quality series.
Low-Light Tests One of the
most obvious limitations of the original Mavicas was their low-light
performance: You just couldn't take pictures in very dark surroundings. We
were therefore surprised to see the excellent results we obtained with the
FD95 even in very dark conditions: The FD95 is comfortably in the current
(June, 2000) first rank in the low-light arena! In straight Automatic
Exposure mode, the MVC-FD95's low light capabilities weren't too great
(only going down as far as 1 foot-candle (325k), or 11 lux). Even at 8
foot-candles (338k) (11 lux), the image is still
quite dark. Switching over to the Twilight Plus mode gave us slightly
better results, with useable images as low as 1/2
foot-candle (338k) (5.5 lux), although we could
still discern a good bit of detail all the way down to 1/16 of a foot-candle (336k)
(0.7 lux). Finally, switching over to Shutter Priority exposure
mode let us select exposure times as long as 8 seconds, producing by far
the best results, and a surprisingly good (although noisy) image at 1/16 of a foot-candle (334k)
(0.7 lux). We'd rate the FD95 as producing very good images down to
light levels of 0.5 foot-candles (5.5 lux), and usable ones to levels of
1/4 of a foot-candle (2.6 lux) and below. (For reference, a city night
scene under typical street lighting corresponds to an illumination level
of 1 foot-candle.)
The table below shows the best exposure we were
able to obtain for each of a range of illumination levels, using the
Shutter Priority exposure mode. Images in this table (like all our sample
photos) are untouched, exactly as they came from the
camera.
Flash Range Test(New) (This test was added in August 1999, so cameras tested
before that time won't have comparison pictures available. As we go
forward though, all the new models will have similar tests available).
Sony rates the MVC-FD95's flash power as effective from 2.7 to 8.3 feet
(0.6 to 2.5 m) in the normal intensity setting, which strikes us as a vast
understatement. In our testing, we found the MVC-FD95's flash to be highly
effective as far out as 15 feet, without much brightness falloff or color
shift at all. We also shot with the Twilight Plus mode, and found similar
results, with the exception of a slightly blue color cast in the images.
The table below shows results obtained at a range of distances from eight
to 15 feet at both the normal flash setting and in the Twilight Plus
mode.
ISO-12233
(WG-18) Resolution Test (291k) In the
resolution department, the FD95 performed about in the middle of the pack
among 2 megapixel cameras we've tested. We "called" the visual resolution
at about 800 lines horizontally, 650 vertically. We saw more color moire
patterns and artifacts in the vertical axis, but they weren't too severe
in either direction. Overall, a good performance, likely a very welcome
upgrade to fans of the earlier 800K pixel FD91. As usual, the tables below
show samples of the range of resolution settings, at both wide angle and
telephoto settings of the lens.
Viewfinder Accuracy/Flash
Uniformity We found the MVC-FD95's LCD monitor to be a little
tight, showing about 92 percent of the final image area at both wide angle (318k) and telephoto (319k) settings. We
assume that the optical viewfinder has the same accuracy level, since it's
basically a smaller version of the rear LCD panel. Although we generally
like to see LCD monitors as close to 100 percent accuracy as possible, the
MVC-FD95 is more accurate than most.
Optical distortion on the
MVC-FD95 is a little high at the wide angle end, showing an approximate
0.9 percent barrel distortion. However, we found virtually no pincushion
distortion at the telephoto end (at least none that we could effectively
measure). Chromatic aberration was moderate, showing about two pixels of
coloration on each side of the black resolution target corner elements.
(This distortion is visible as a very slight colored fringe around the
objects at the edges of the field of view on the resolution target). There
is also some lens flare in the corners of the image in telphoto mode.
Flash distribution was very good, with just a slight fall-off in the
corners at the wide angle setting.
