Re: cam shootout cont. 928/1520/830
Let's Harvest Some Crops:
It is an overcast day, but not too heavy on the cloud cover. A flat, uniform light that makes for pretty easy shots. Everything is well lit without worry about the light source overwhelming the lens. First up is a simple distance shot with a well defined foreground and background. Lumia Camera for the App, hand held with auto-everything except flash forced off. The original size is uploaded with the 5MP oversample for 1520.
Lumia 928
Lumia 1520
Lumia 830
Easy shots make for hard decisions as to which camera did best... All of these are acceptable and even side by side they are very close. Remember that Lumia 928 has an aperture of f/2.0, L830 is f/2.2 and L1520 is f/2.4. The smaller number is actually a larger hole for light to pass through. It will gather more light, but a smaller hole (higher number) will allow more depth of field (focus).
Aperture - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia This shot helps exemplify the principles of aperture in action and since it is a fixed quantity on the Lumias we need to try and understand what the strengths of the modules are.
By laying the pics out side by side we can see a bit of fuzziness, a softening, on the shot from 928. Alone it looks nice, but scrutinized in the presence of the other examples we also see a weakness in the color capture in the diffuse lighting. The 1520 is the crispest shot and the greens of the grass and the trees pop the most... The middle of the spectrum. The 830 gives up just a touch of sharpness on the image, but gathers more light than 1520 and makes the whole spectrum of color more vivid than either two. Compare the natural greens in the foreground, the orange canopy and the colored signs in the middle ground plaza, or the blue and red of the sign in the background across the main thoroughfare and the green roof on the portico even further back. Then come forward again and look at the junction boxes on the lawn and the browns of the brick and the cedar shake shingles. 830 made the best use of the subject matter in a lot of the finer details and still produced a reasonably crisp image throughout the entire depth.
Let's crop in on the background and look at those cranes... We're using the 8.7MP .jpg from the Lumia 928 and the 10MP .jpg from the L830. With the 1520 I set it for 5MP.jpg + 16MP.jpg and we'll take a crop from each.
Lumia 928
Lumia 1520 @ 5MP
Lumia 1520 @ 16MP
Lumia 830
Again, all 3 are acceptable and we have to resort to examining minor differences. 928 is the least sharp with 1520 being the sharpest and 830 not far behind. But here's a surprise. Look at the green of the glass and the blue of the sky (mid-spectrum) of the 1520 compared to the others. On such a tight crop we really need to look at size and the 16MP option of the 1520 wins there as well.
Next we'll take a crop from a little closer in; the front end of the Pontiac in the foreground. This time we only need the 5MP image from Lumia 1520...
Lumia 928
Lumia 1520
Lumia 830
We have already seen how 928 is at a disadvantage without a specific (manual) focus point being selected. And even though this is almost a greyscale subject with white, grey and black being represented so heavily the 1520 shows a bit of weakness on the user of light and picks up a dullness from the illumination. I feel 830 takes this one. look at the clarity of the numbers on the license plate, the luster on the grey nose of the auto, the shine of light on the headlight lenses and the richness of the black in the grill.