First digital Kodak P850 or Fuji S5200 or???

[Rags]

Budget

around +-400
Size

I’d like compact but not tiny.
Features

How many megapixels will suffice for you?
5+
Good 10+ optical zoom* How important is “image quality” to you? Image quality of prime importance 10

IS is important. I have very small hands and a slight tremor although I have learned to compensate some with breathing. I don’t know whether the anti blur on the Fuji’s will be useful for this or not.

Do you care for manual controls?
Would be good

General Usage

I’m about to buy my first digital camera. I will taking pictures of people singly and sometimes in groups, mostly inside, but also sometimes outside, and I take many pictures of the sky and of nature. I will also be using it for taking pictures for on-line auctions and will need to be able to have fairly clear close ups (for things like seeing the signature on pottery). Clarity of image is a high priority anyhow. As I often do landscapes and skyscapes I expect I need a decent amount of wide angle. At least so far, I haven’t done a lot of action shots—e.g. not shooting sports.
I want a camera that I can grow with, but I’m sharing it with my husband who is a technophobe and needs very easy point and shoot, although being a sweetie he has said I should get what will suit me. I am likely to want more possibilities of experimentation once I’ve learned what the camera can do.

Miscellaneous

I had been looking at the Panasonic FZ5 and FZ20 because I was very impressed with the quality of image I've seen on the comparison charts, but understand there is a problem with low light and noise. I’m very interested in both the new Kodak P850 and the Fuji 5200. The Fuji s9000 is out of my budget range. Anyone have experience with either of these or have any idea how they compare.
Or any other suggestions.
Thanks in advance.
Ruth

[tclune]

It's very hard to evaluate a camera meaningfully. Since there seem to be a lot more opinions than insight that gets offered on camera selection, I'd like to discuss a bit of what makes it hard to evaluate cameras and what you can view as objective and immutable.

First, there are some things that are clearly objective and out of your control to adjust. For a lens, these things include range of wide angle/zoom operation; lens brightness (how wide an aperture does the lens have at wide angle and max zoom); pincushion distirtion at long zoom; barrel distortion at wide angle; loss of sharpness or brightness at the edges of a lens; and chromatic aberration, especially at long zoom. These things can all be measured objectively, and do not change with user-selectable options in the camera.

Relative to the lens, these things can change with user selectable options: amount of visible noise and crispness of focus. Almost all reviews that concentrate on these things do so at the default setting from the manufacturer. This has more to do with what the manufacturer values than what the camera will do. What makes this particularly problematic is that both these details are really, really important.

To illustrate what I mean, my touchy-feely impression after much evaluation is that the Canon S2 IS, the Sony DSC H1, and the FZ20 all have pretty similar characteristics with respect to the noise of their image sensors. However, the Sony smooths away all noise by default, and then sharpens the images in a way that the images show very noticeable Gibbs effects (wavy lines around sharp borders). Sony appears to think that consumers are more attuned to noise than to other factors in image quality. The FZ20, on the other hand, shows a fair amount of noise, but spectacular resolution. Panasonic clearly sees the Leica lens as its big selling point, and pushes its resolution at the expense of visible noise. Canon by default seems to split the difference between these two.

Now, reviewers seem to look at the default settings and use them to pass judgement on the camera's capabilities. What you would really need to do is buy one of these cameras and play with the user settings for an extended period of time before you could settle in on what, for you, is the optimal setting on the given camera. Then, you can decide whether it really meets your needs.

WRT the lens properties that are not subject to user control, you can reliably make judgements about the camera from review images that highlight the given effects. But it is still hard to know what a picture of, say, a test grid has to do with the quality of your snapshots of Aunt Tillie.

Color is another really big issue that is hard to evaluate. One pet peeve of mine is the extent to which people have gravitated toward "Kodachrome" style super-saturated colors. It almost seems that any color that is garish is automatically deemed "good." My desire is to capture as true a likeness as possible, not to capture a scene that makes every cloudy day look as bright as possible. Most manufacturers now overpower the color saturation by default. All this is adjustable, but the extent to which it can be adjusted varies with cameras. If, like me, you would rather have pale skin tones on your pale relatives than have everyone look like a California girl, you won't know if you can do that until you buy the camera and play with it.

Automatic white balance is a bit easier to get a sense of from reviews, but I seldom find auto white balance acceptable. So, for me at least, the question is what the range of adjustments really can do to match the balance that is in the scene. This is a very hard question. To my eye, at least, colors under incadescent lights are much more yellow than if I set a manual white balance and much less yellow than if I use the typical camera's preset for incadescent light. How do I evaluate what the camera can do? Only by living with it for an extended period of time. How "portable" are my expectations and goals to you? Probably not very.

One really easy-to-evaluate objective number is ISO range. For most cameras in a given class, the range will be the same as the pother cameras in that class, though. This is pretty much determined by the market. One big exception to this rule is the new Fuji S5200. It has ISO ratings up to 1600 and is a direct competitor to the other cameras I've been using as illustration (I've chosen these because I recently evaluated them for my own purchase, not because they best fit your question. Sorry). Those cameras all have a max ISO of 400. But the other cameras all have image stabilization. Which is better?

Well, if you're taking an action shot in low light that is reasonably close, the ISO wins hands down. If you're taking a long shot of a bird sitting on a branch, the choice gets harder. Add to that the fact that the Fuji only goes out to 10x, and has a max aperture of 3.5 at that zoom, and the comparisons get harder. For example, the FZ20 has a max aperture of 2.8 at that zoom. The difference in lens brightness requires the Fuji to be set to an ISO of 625 just to equal the brightness of the FZ20's aperture. How do you decide between the 12x vs 10x or the greater ISO rating, let alone factor in the value of image stabilization? And, if you consider SUBJECT motion, the IS doesn't help you at all. Are the cameras really comparable in any sense other than occupying the same price niche?

My long-winded point is that it is extremely difficult to take the true meaure of any camera except by lving with it for an extended period of time. The overall quality of digital cameras has gone up tremendously in the lat couple of years, so you will probably be fine if you just identify the class of camera that you aare looking for, get a sense of which camera intrigues you (for whatever reason -- packaging, special feature that seems cool, etc), make sure that it isn't missing or very deficient in any feature that's really important to you (for example, the FZ20 has an absolutely terrible movie mode, if that matters to you), and buy it and concentrate on learning how to actually get the quality that is in the camera out onto your images.

And then plan on doing it all again in a couple of years, when the technology has marched far enough forward to make you jealous!
________
Chevrolet S-10 Blazer (http://www.chevy-wiki.com/wiki/Chevrolet_S-10_Blazer)

[Rags]

Thank you for your very educative and informative reply. One of the reasons I am asking people on forums is just because many have had long term and direct experience of some of these cameras and have interesting things to say. For example, I understand the Panasonic fz5 and fz20 are not good in low light, but as I live in the Pacific Northwest it is cloudy and overcast much of the time. Does that mean the Panasonics won't be good in that kind of light? How low is low?
I understand that some of the evaluation is about preferences--like color saturation and noise vs. sharpness. I'm impressed with the Leica lens but don't know if they would work for my needs.
Also, the P850 sounded really great on paper, but I've been reading some not so great responses from people who have bought it. Likewise the Fuji s5200 sounds very good on paper, so I'm interested to hear from anyone who has bought one.
Ruth

[tclune]

When people talk about these cameras being bad in low light, they don't mean cloudy days. Typical places where low light would be a problem are night football games, where the field lights are a lot less bright than you think they are, or iindoors. Often, with a camera like the Fuji S5200, you could take a picture indoors without flash and without having to use a very slow shutter speed. What is good about that is that flash is often not allowed and, almost as often, not applicable. If the subject you are shooting is across a large room or on an auditorium stage, flash may simply not reach.

The truth is that any camera that has a 400 ISO max rating will be pretty much in the same boat (the Kodak is really 400 max, except in an oddball small image format, where it goes to 800). So this is not a major difference for any of the cameras in the 400 ISO rating range to my mind.

It should be mentioned that the ability to see through the viewfinder may be a variable here. The S2 IS has gotten bad press on this, but most people don't find it any more of a problem than the Sony or the Panasonic. What DOES improve these things is if you get an EVF (electronic veiwfinder) with more pixels in it. The three mentioned (and the Fuji) are in the roughly 150,000 pixels range. Some ultra-zooms have closer to 250,000 pixels in them, and will be brighter in low light because of it. The Kodak is in this class. Of course, the final picture won't be any brighter just because the EVF is brighter, but it will be easier to find and frame the picture that you want to take in low light.

There is a noticeable difference in the power of the built-in flash on these units. Look for the maximum range on the spec sheets. This was one thing that I found better with the FZ20 than the FZ5. The built-in was good for over 20 feet instead of less than 15. But, more than that, the FZ20 has a hot shoe. This allows you to buy an inexpensive external flash that makes indoor flash almost fool-proof. The way for any dummy like me to get very acceptable flash is to use bounce flash (no red-eye ever, more diffuse-- and therefore "natural" -- lighting, no harsh shadow from a person being too close to a wall when photographed in the vast majority of cases). External flash can do bounce lighting and built-in flash can't. In addition, the range of external flash is much further. My little $80 external flash unit is very usable up to about 60 feet.

For me, one other capability on the camera that was important was the ability to remotely trigger the shutter. What this means is that some cameras allow you to attach a wire to them that will let you click the shutter from a button on the other end of the wire. If you use a tripod and take slow shutter speed photos, this is a very desireable feature -- you don't move the camera by clicking the shutter button.

You may have similar requirements that are important to you, but probably a complete yawn to many others. You just want to try to identify what they are and then buy your camera with your check-list in front of you.

One common thing that some people find valuable is the availability of RAW picture file images. These are useful if you like to work with the images in PhotoShop. If that's not what you like to do, and are not likely to develop that as a hobby, RAW would not be particularly important. But, if you do like to play with the pictues later, RAW gives you the ability to , e.g., adjust white balance in software after the picture has been taken.
________
Honda Zoomer history (http://www.honda-wiki.org/wiki/Honda_Zoomer)

[Rags]

Thanks again for your very useful and informative reply. One further question.
The Panasonics are noted for being 'noisy'. How much of that can be corrected with software without messing up the quality of the image. The quality of lens on the Panasonics is very attractive and I'm wondering how much that limitation can be overcome.
I will probably wait until I hear from people about the Fuji s5200 to decide. It seems that everyone trying to do this has the same trouble and you've made it clear why we are all so confused. Thanks again.
Ruth

[Rambler358]

I think the best bet is to look at sample pictures from each camera you're interested in, and there's plenty around here, www.dpreview.com and at www.steves-digicams.com

Go into the Fourms section for each of the respective cameras, and you should find plenty of sample pictures in the forum threads to give you an idea of what to expect. Also try and get a feel for each of the cameras at your local store. This is what I did, and I ended up taking the P850 home with me for a real-world evaluation. Needless to say, it's almost 3 weeks later and I still have the P850. :) Good luck with your decision!

[tclune]

Rambler has offered some very good advice. The DPreveiw site is especially good at comparison photos, I think. Their section on the FZ20's comparisons start here:http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/panasonicfz20/page6.asp. Pay especial attention to the noise standard deviations versus the relative quality of the images, and you may decide that, within limits, noise measurements are not very good indicators of image quality.

My personal opinion (I ended up buying and loving the FZ20, so I am not without prejudice here) is that Panasonic has made exactly the right choice WRT noise on the FZ5 and 20 (I'm not sure I feel the same about the 30 -- I wish they had settled for fewer, less noisy, pixels). The choice that they made was to let the noise through (at least in their default mode. The also have user settings to increase the smoothing and up the contrast -- I haven't even tried these, as my impulse is in the other direction). For most images, you will not need to denoise at all. If you do, there are many software programs available that make this almost automatic.

But even here, I prefer the least noise reduction possible, so I tend to avoid these programs. The trade-off is, as you note, between crisp resolution and low noise. On those images that I choose to run noise reduction, I use a standard median filter of the smallest selection kernel size I can. If there is chromatic noise (very rare), I edit the spots manually. I have never had an image with so wide-spread chromatic noise that I needed to run a fitler for it over the whole image. The net effect is to preserve the resolution to the highest extent consistent with a decent image.

If you had a really awful image that you needed to salvage, you would probably want more hefty software than general-purpose software like PhotoShop or PaintShopPro. But the number of times that it would be of value is, in my experience, so low that it's hardly worth considering. Many people have a different view, of course.
________
buy aromed vaporizer (http://www.vaporshop.com/aromed-vaporizer.html)

[Rags]

Thanks once again Rambler and Tclune for your advice. I have in fact been researching and using all the digital camera sites I could find, including Steve's and Dpreview. That's how I narrowed the field to what I currently have--mostly between possibly Fuji s5200 and Panasonic Z20 and the Canon S2IS. It's the comparison pics that sold me on the Panasonic lens but it's perhaps not the best camera for my uses. From the sounds of it, they are all actually pretty good and have their enthusiasts. I'll just have to make a decision. I think I need to go to a store and see how they feel in my hands before I decide. Thanks again for all the helpful information.
Ruth