Tuesday, July 3, 2007

N95 camera - scene settings

I've been playing with the camera settings during the last couple of days. There's something very strange in the way some of the scenes work.
N95 allows you to choose between eight different scenes:
  • Auto
  • User defined
  • Close-up
  • Portrait
  • Landscape
  • Sports
  • Night
  • Night portrait
I took a photo using landscape scene. When I opened the photo in PhotoShop it was not what I expected. Most of the image was out of focus and it seemed to have a very small depth of field (DOF). Landscape scene setting is normally used to give you a large depth of field. The area within the depth of field appears sharp while the areas in front of and beyond the depth of field appear blurry. Small depth of field is certainly not something that you would expect when using landscape scene.
I thought I'd experiment a bit with the scene settings and took photos using Auto, Portrait and Landscape scene. I then compared them in Photoshop to see if there really was something strange. Below is a set of three images with different scene settings: Auto, Portrait and Landscape (from top to bottom).




Most of the time I've been using Auto scene when taking photos with N95 and haven't noticed anything strange. The first image, taken with Auto setting, seems to be as expected.
The second image is taken using Portrait setting. What I'd expect from a Portrait setting is a small depth of field. It usually used when taking photos of a person and you want the person to appear in focus while anything in front or behind the person are blurred. The Portrait photo taken using N95 is completely opposite. It seems sharp all the way from near to far. A closer look tells that a lot of post-processing has been done to sharpen the image.
The third photo was taken using landscape scene. First thing I noticed when taking a photo in landscape scene was that the lens didn't try to focus at all. As you can see from the photo, it has very small depth of field while objects near and far are blurred. Not really what you'd expect in a Landscape mode.
Landscape and Portrait scenes seem to produce unexpected results. It almost seems like the Portrait and Landscape modes should be switched. I thought I had accidentally changed the scene modes in wrong order but when I repeated the experiment (several times) I always got the same result.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

great post, i'll try it with my n95 8GB