Possibly Broken Image Stabilization

[Khan]

Hello all-

I recently purchased my first digital camera. On the advice of a photography professor at my school, I looked for something with image stabilization. I also wanted the option to take RAW images. These two prerequisites (and a very small budget ;) ) led me to buy a refurbished Kodak P850.

The problem is, a large number of my pictures come out blurry, even though my subjects are almost always still. (I've been visiting a lot of museums this summer.)

I tried a few test shots, taking full zoom (12x) shots of printed text from across a room, both with and without stabilization turned on. I've come to the conclusion that it makes no difference ... at least not as I'm using the camera now.

I should point out that I never took any photography classes from the prof I mentioned; I'm almost a complete newbie when it comes to cameras. I leave almost every option on the "auto" setting, except for flash, which I turned off. My question is this: is my refurbished camera damaged? Or is it possible that I'm just doing something wrong? Any help or advice would be appreciated.

[David Metsky]

IS can reduce hand shake, but not eliminate it. If your shot is in low light, the shutter speed might be too slow for the IS to compensate. Have you looked at the EXIF data from the images to get the ISO and shutter speed?

-dave-

[Khan]

Come to think of it, darker conditions have made for worse pictures. And you're right: the blurry pics tend to have longer exposure times. All the pictures have an ISO of 100. I'll have to play around with the settings a bit.

For darker conditions, is there something I can do to improve my pictures beside "hold my hands REALLY still" ?

Also, is EXIF data available for RAW (*.KDC) images? How do I access it?

Thanks for your help. -K

[David Metsky]

You can push the ISO up higher, that will let the camera operate at a faster shutter speed and work with your IS to freeze the subject.

If you are indoors, taking pictures of text at full zoom you are going to need A LOT of light. IS isn't going to help in that situation, except marginally. You may be expecting far too much from IS.

[Khan]

I wasn't expecting the text to be fully legible; I just wanted a good way to measure *how* blurry the pictures were on different settings.

After playing with it, it looks like I was putting too much faith in the "auto" ISO setting. In the future, I'll manually bump it up when I'm indoors.

Thanks for your help -- and patience :D