New camera

[a_gs]

I have replaced the last device that the robbers taken on July 3 -- a digital camera. I wanted a cheap (up to $200) camera that would be a reasonable improvement over the stolen one, so I have bough Fujifilm FinePix A900, choosing it mostly for its image quality in low light. Even though this camera is firmly in the "consumer" range and is supposed to be simple, there was one important detail -- I had to adjust my postprocessing/cleanup technique for it. The camera seems to produce very little color noise in poor light conditions, and the noise is mostly high frequency, so it disappears when image is scaled down. However this negates the advantage of high resolution, so I had to find a way to reduce the visible noise, and eventually succeeded. The problem is, my efforts to reduce the noise at high resolution make high-resolution images look much better but increase the amount of noise if they are scaled down because filtering produces its own artifacts. Fortunately at the point when it happens, just scaling down the original image gives better results:

Original image:
Full resolution 3488x2616
Scaled to 1744x1308
Scaled to 1024x768
Scaled to 800x600
Scaled to 640x480:


Same image after despeckle, slight increase of black level and color correction:
Full resolution 3488x2616
Scaled to 1744x1308
Scaled to 1024x768
Scaled to 800x600
Scaled to 640x480:


Two upper resolutions seem to be better in the second group, the rest is the other way around.

In any case I like it better than low-frequency color noise that appears on the photos taken by other cameras I have tested.