Variance in file size in FZ5

[Brommers]

I am trying to find out if my camera is faulty or just a trait. My old camera, a pentax 550 at super fine produced consistant images at 2.8 to 3 meg. The FZ5 in equivalent setting is producing sizes 880k to 1.8 meg from image to image same picture, same lighting etc. The pictures look OK but I can't help but think at that size I must be recording less detail and I can't understand why it should vary so much. Any help appreciated. :confused:

[meillana]

not really less detail, just goes to show that the compression rates of newer cameras have in fact matured and are better thus smaller file size :cool:

[John_Reed]

I am trying to find out if my camera is faulty or just a trait. My old camera, a pentax 550 at super fine produced consistant images at 2.8 to 3 meg. The FZ5 in equivalent setting is producing sizes 880k to 1.8 meg from image to image same picture, same lighting etc. The pictures look OK but I can't help but think at that size I must be recording less detail and I can't understand why it should vary so much. Any help appreciated. :confused:JPEG compression will create a smaller file of a blank wall than it will of a newspaper, for example. That's pretty normal, I've seen it also on my Nikon and Olympus cameras in the past. But if you're saying you're seeing different file sizes for the exact same photo, that's weird. What is it you're really seeing? And are you shooting in Fine or Normal?

[bebran]

By taking pictures of the same object (high colour/contrast and low light) in different ISO setups I've produced a serie of pictures with different sizes and noise levels - higher noise levels gives larger files. The JPEG compression algoritme can't compress noisy pictures very well - high diversity in colours gives a low compression ratio.

I've then tested a couple of noise reduction (NR) software solutions (GIMP, NeatImage, ImageMagick, etc.) and they will all produce a smaller image after removing excessive noise from the pictures. After performing NR on an ISO 400 image it will be app. half size (around 1 MB) and it will be almost as good as the ISO 80 image without NR, only loosing details shown when zooming or printing to large scale formats. These NR solutions are very computer intensive (app. 10-20 sec. for a 5MP image on a Intel P4-3.0) and we'll probably see more agressive NR built into the cameras as dedicated camera cpus gets faster (processing 3 pict./sec. on-the-fly). This, combined with a larger compression ratio in the FZ5, might explain why your new camera makes smaller pictures than the old.

When using ISO 400 my FZ5 will produce noisy pictures but I'm able to take pictures of indoor sporting events without using the flash - I just need to run NR to make them 'clean'.

By the way - I'm using the low compression setting (Fine). Might try out TIFF one day.