Novice with problems :(

[60mm]

:confused: Ive been taking pictures last couple days with my new fz20, and have noticed a few things.
1.I have a Sandisk Ultra II 512mb card, but its slower than the little 16mb that came with the camera!?!?! On the fastest burst mode, I can get like 1/second. On P mode, no flash, fine compression, highest res. Is this normal?
2.Outdoors at night look ok, but indoors even slightly below well lit is horrible. Im talking worse than disposable 35mm. I took severals pics of a friend sitting on the bottom be of a bunk bed in a well lit room. Just the shadow of the top bed made it look dark and noisy. I tried all ISO settings, and changing the exposure. Flash clears it right up and makes it sharp, but then there is no shadow, soI cant should it as it looks. Really frustrating. It seems like indoors this camera just struggles. Is there anything I can do? Thanks!

[60mm]

Also, forgot, anything black/dark in the picture has blue noise in it. Even when the place is well lit. Is this defective?

[judge9847]

Also, forgot, anything black/dark in the picture has blue noise in it. Even when the place is well lit. Is this defective?
To try and understand better what the problems are, it would be very helpful indeed if you could post a link to some of the photos that you're worried about. Very often the EXIF data can yield some clues so if you could post that as well it would help that much more.

[genece]

:confused: Ive been taking pictures last couple days with my new fz20, and have noticed a few things.
1.I have a Sandisk Ultra II 512mb card, but its slower than the little 16mb that came with the camera!?!?! On the fastest burst mode, I can get like 1/second. On P mode, no flash, fine compression, highest res. Is this normal?

The camera should take pictures in burst mode at 4 per second. where the speed comes into play is how long it takes to write those photos to the card the slow card will take 10 seconds or so while the fast card should do it in 2 seconds.
By the way continuous burst is not that fast 1 or 2 per second.



2.Outdoors at night look ok, but indoors even slightly below well lit is horrible. Im talking worse than disposable 35mm. I took severals pics of a friend sitting on the bottom be of a bunk bed in a well lit room. Just the shadow of the top bed made it look dark and noisy. I tried all ISO settings, and changing the exposure. Flash clears it right up and makes it sharp, but then there is no shadow, soI cant should it as it looks. Really frustrating. It seems like indoors this camera just struggles. Is there anything I can do? Thanks!


The camera should do well in a well lit room.
Set exposure compesation to 0
Set ISO to auto
turn off burst mode (just to try)
And put the camera in P mode
Set sharpness, contrast and saturation to low (again to try)
And if you have a filter on the camera Remove it to test.

[60mm]

These are 2 examples of the "blue-ness". The fan picture shows the blue noise in anything dark, even under light. The second shows the blue noise in any shadow. And it looks alot worse when its not resized. Lots of blue noise.
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v201/x60mm/P1010075example.jpg
This one shows me taking a picture with manual white balance to correct the color. The color turns out great, but it too adds blue noise. If you look at the lense and on my shirt.
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v201/x60mm/wmwb.jpg
This one is with auto white balance. It comes up with no blue noise, but the color is way off.
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v201/x60mm/wawb.jpg


As for the EXIF data, I know neither what it is, nor where/how to get it. I tried to look for hidden files in the memory card, but to no avail. Is it like a log file for pictures?

Also any advice on the memory card?

[genece]

What ever program You used to process the photos stripped the exif.
You do not need to do anything to have the exif but you need something to read it. Your Photo editor can do that as can many exif reader programs.
If you are using XP a right click on the photo > choose properties > summary > advanced and there it is.
Those photos are compressed too much to make much of a guess as to the noise.
But it looks to me like you cut a piece out of the original photo.
Here is a reader if you need it
http://www.takenet.or.jp/~ryuuji/minisoft/exifread/english/

[judge9847]

What ever program You used to process the photos stripped the exif.

Those photos are compressed too much to make much of a guess as to the noise.

But it looks to me like you cut a piece out of the original photo.
Re. stripping EXIF: Correct. It's the reason why I asked if there was a link to another website where the photos were stored.

What's happened here is that it's impossible to tell if the "noise" is caused by the camera or by the fact that the images have had to be compressed to a sensible size to get them posted here. That can cause "noise" to appear in over-compressed images.

If you can post the images, resized to no more than 1024x768 and absolutely nothing else done to them, so effectively almost straight out of the camera, post them to a web address and then let us know where they are we can see what you mean. And we'll see the EXIF data as well.

EXIF data is generated every single time you take a digital photograph. It's detail that stored with the image so that details about flash operation, ISO settings, WB, shutter speed and just about everything else is always available. It adds a bit to the file size but it's information that can be priceless in situations like this.