I have a new camera...

Ended up with a Canon Ixus 110IS, 12.1MP. It also takes 720p video.

Going out with the dog for a long walk after supper, so I'll see how it performs.

Cool. Sample pictures to follow?

Mark

Yep, I went out and took some pictures last night, whilst walking the dog.

The laptop here is pretty useless though, incredibly slow. It takes around 20 seconds to load an image, so I'll wait until I get home and then try and upload them, I think.

First impressions, looking on the screen on the laptop is - as thumbnails and at 25% size - they look excellent. Look at them at 100% size and they are absolutely dreadful!

Worse quality than my 15 year old Olympus camera! They are grainy and the colours look washed out. That is using the maximum resolution and high quality image modes...

Edit: What the hey... Created a Flickr account (http://www.flickr.com/photos/wright_is) and uploaded a couple of test images. These are the un-edited images, direct from the camera, at full resolution (4000x3000).

Advice on how to set things up better would be welcome.

Edit 2: Just shrank the image of the class down, using MS Office image viewer, scaled it to fit my laptops screen and the image is very nice. Is this a "problem" with high mega pixel count, that on a screen, the images need to be shrunk down to look good?

Will try printing when I get home as well...

Well, it's not a very scientific test, but I just looked at a couple of your piccies uploaded, and they look fine to me.

Which sort of points the problems as being the screen/graphics not being able to cope with the quality.

As a test, you could try copying the originals over to your Mac, and seeing if the problem persists. Have you ever manually calibrated the iMac's screen, or is it still on default settings?

I think it is the relatively low pixel density of an LCD screen.

We are talking about a 4000x3000 image being viewed on 1280x800 screen. When the image is scaled, it looks fine. When you look at it at 100%, you get a lot of artifacts, noise etc. But such a large image is, according to the handbook for A2 printing, not viewing the image on a 15" laptop screen at 1:1 pixel ratio.

With the older cameras, the resolution was nearly the same as the screen, maybe a bit larger, so the pixel density was very similar. The new camera has 4 times the pixel density of the one it replaces, but the lens isn't 4 times the definition.

I think I was expecting incredibly sharp images at the native resolution, whereas the MP count is too high for the lens, when viewing on a low DPI output device at 1:1.

So, just looking at the images on Vista, with the 24" monitor, much better. Not sure if it is XP or the laptop.

The images are still very grainy in places, but a huge improvement over the results I saw this morning.

The link you posted doesn't work for me.

Flickr tells me it's a bad link.

Try clicky