Digicam vs dSLR (The Rose and Bowl)

The last post was a lot of technical talk about mirrors, lenses, and the differences between how you build the two types of cameras. Sorry if it got to be a bit much, but there's a reason I don't build these contraptions. That stuff is complicated even to me, and I've seen mechanical diagrams.

Today's comparison won't have much of anything to do with the lenses or mirrors involved in the cameras, nor where the viewfinder is located on the body of the camera. The subject is a small cluster if pink roses, taken from about 3 or 4 feet away, using all the default "Auto" settings on both a Kodak Easyshare 4.1 Megapixel digicam, and a Nikon D60 10.2 Megapixel dSLR. We're going to ignore the technical stuff like lens size, exposure rating, flash speed, and all that. Maybe next week we'll revisit these images and poke at all the numbers!

First off, let's introduce our contenders.

This image was taken with the digicam. It's got nice, warm colors, good clarity, and a broad depth of field.

It required me to just turn the camera on, let the motor whir and the lens extend from the body, and I shot the image while looking at the LCD view screen on the back. No squinting and peering through a tiny peep hole, and no settings to worry about. Point, shoot, and you can tell exactly what I'm looking at. The roses are pink, the leaves are green, and even the bird bath is looking kind of spiffy (if a bit dry...)


This next image has been reduced down to the exact same pixel width. It's not as tall, though, because the dimensions of the sensors are different. I'll talk about sensors another time. Think of this camera as "wide screen" like movies at the theater, different from the ones on television. I was standing in exactly the same spot as for the previous image, and of the same rose cluster.

This image is slightly cooler (that means it has more blue to it), but it's still pleasing to the eye. The roses are still pink, and the leaves are still green. Even the birdbath still looks rustic and quaint, and the makers would be pleased to know that the soft plastic looks very much like a copper basin. But if you look at that empty bird bath, you may notice a key difference between the two images. It's a difference that makes the roses in the second image 'pop' out of the background and become more noticeable.



Look at this mess! What a horribly blurry image! You can barely tell what this is, and you probably only guessed that it's the top of the bird bath because you've been looking at the above pictures. This is ridiculous, and would never pass as a standalone picture. The gaps in the side are smeared together in a single, smooth blur, and you can forget telling any detail about the tree in the background. You can't even tell if there is water in the bird bath, or if that's just a smeared reflection of the surface itself. It is so out of focus, you have to wonder what the photographer was looking at.


Well that's a little better. After all, now we can see the holes along the side of the basin, you can be relatively sure that the bowl is empty, and there's even evidence of texture and variations in color in those places where the sunlight hasn't blown out all detail. You could believe that the photographer was pretty interested in this part of the image, and he wanted you to pay some attention to it.

Except that's all wrong. This is supposed to be the background. You want this sort of detail faded out and unimportant, so it doesn't distract from your main subject. If you have too much detail in the background, then you start losing that direction, and it starts to become confusing for your viewers when they try and find what it is they are supposed to be focusing on.

Let's zoom in on the aspect that we do want to focus on.


This is from the dSLR. This is sized to 100%, meaning that the rest of the image would be huge if it tried to fit on your screen. Go ahead and look at that image up there at the top of the page and imagine those little pink roses in the center were this large, and you have it.

Look at the way the detail is sharp and crisp on the roses - and then notice the fact that everything in the background is just gone. There's no chance you can tell what's back there, only that it is mottled green. That's good! That means your viewers are only seeing those flowers and going "Wow, that drought is tough on them!" Well, hopefully they're saying "Wow!" about the pretty pink flowers, too. But they do look kind of rough...


And here we have the image from the digicam, also 100%, so you can go ahead and compare the full image from way above and see how large this image would be. It would also make for a pretty huge picture if you blew it up full-size. Not quite as large as the SLR, but it's not a bad camera at all. But see how you can see the background? You can tell there's a fence, there's some leaves, probably that there's some grassless dirt further on. It's a very busy background.

You'll also notice there's some 'noise' in this image at this size. There are places where the fact that the image was digital becomes very noticeable. Looking close, you'll see places where colors seem to blend into square patches. These are called 'artifacts' and they are the bane of any person who has to work with digital imagery. It's similar, in ways, to the graininess of old film photography, but as you can see, it doesn't have the classic appeal of a grainy .35 mm shot. The places where the digicam become 'blurry' tend more towards the 'smeared' look a lot more than the way the SLR creates a consistent 'soft focus' effect.

The digicam proves once again why and how it is excellent for family shots, quick photos with the kids, and a snapshot of the family garden to email to family far away. But if you want something more than that, with a bit more personality and a lot more potential for art, well...

You'll have to break through that brick wall.