megg
04-18-2005, 11:11 AM
Has anyone else experienced this same or similar problem?
In my search for a new digicam I have been stongly considering the FZ5. To help make my decision I've been doing some serious "playing" with it at Ritz Camera and noticed that there seems to be a significant problem with the white balance quality under the store's florescent lights.
I snapped and printed some test pictures of some medium/dark-honey colored teddy bears they have for sale. They came out a gold-yellow on both the review via the lcd and when printed on the store's thermal printer. (I had seen some other pictures of things printed on this printer and they seemed okay - so I don't think it was the printer's problem.)
This isn't good at all.... you run into florescent lights just about everywhere you go. I don't want to invest this kind of money on a camera to have the subjects of the pictures taken in that kind of lighting looking like they need to be hospitalized for severe jaundice! :eek:
I checked the camera's manual and there's not a white balance setting for florescent light (only auto, daylight, cloudy, halogen, flash and manual). Just to make sure it wasn't a setting that someone else before me had made that I missed while tinkering, I reset the camera back to the factory defaults and tried the shots again - with the same result. I then tried manually setting the white balance (using the white color from the side of a printer box they had on display) and the result was only moderately better. (Should I have used something gray instead? What shade of gray? Please explain the gray vs white thing in setting manual wb??)
The only way I could get a halfway acceptable replication of the bear's color was - at the sales person's suggestion - to use the auto white balance I had set then manually adjust the exposure down by two of the tic marks on the graph (don't know what each tic marks represents so can't tell you more than that). To me, that seems like an awful lot of tweaking to do for such an expensive camera in order to get good quality pictures every time you take photos in florescent light.
Unfortunately I can't post the pictures for you to see as they were taken with the store's SD card and I didn't have the $$ at the time to have them make a cd of the test shots. The store also kept the shots (they didn't charge me for them since I was considering buying the camera).
Help Please!!! Before I sink my money into something that isn't going to work.
In my search for a new digicam I have been stongly considering the FZ5. To help make my decision I've been doing some serious "playing" with it at Ritz Camera and noticed that there seems to be a significant problem with the white balance quality under the store's florescent lights.
I snapped and printed some test pictures of some medium/dark-honey colored teddy bears they have for sale. They came out a gold-yellow on both the review via the lcd and when printed on the store's thermal printer. (I had seen some other pictures of things printed on this printer and they seemed okay - so I don't think it was the printer's problem.)
This isn't good at all.... you run into florescent lights just about everywhere you go. I don't want to invest this kind of money on a camera to have the subjects of the pictures taken in that kind of lighting looking like they need to be hospitalized for severe jaundice! :eek:
I checked the camera's manual and there's not a white balance setting for florescent light (only auto, daylight, cloudy, halogen, flash and manual). Just to make sure it wasn't a setting that someone else before me had made that I missed while tinkering, I reset the camera back to the factory defaults and tried the shots again - with the same result. I then tried manually setting the white balance (using the white color from the side of a printer box they had on display) and the result was only moderately better. (Should I have used something gray instead? What shade of gray? Please explain the gray vs white thing in setting manual wb??)
The only way I could get a halfway acceptable replication of the bear's color was - at the sales person's suggestion - to use the auto white balance I had set then manually adjust the exposure down by two of the tic marks on the graph (don't know what each tic marks represents so can't tell you more than that). To me, that seems like an awful lot of tweaking to do for such an expensive camera in order to get good quality pictures every time you take photos in florescent light.
Unfortunately I can't post the pictures for you to see as they were taken with the store's SD card and I didn't have the $$ at the time to have them make a cd of the test shots. The store also kept the shots (they didn't charge me for them since I was considering buying the camera).
Help Please!!! Before I sink my money into something that isn't going to work.