The comparison images for the Toshiba look great, but are HUGE! Please note the compression, if any, used for each image, as well as any "non-auto" image settings.

(FWIW, I keep on looking for something which beats out the Canon A-5, but even with superior resolution, it is still in the lead for my purposes. I do feel, though, that it is probably about to undergo a price reduction, given the aggressive competition at present (you heard it here first!), so I'll wait for a bit... we'll see!

Thanks- Bob

-- Bob Ashforth (ashforth@zk3.dec.com), September 25, 1998

Answers

HUGE... that's what 1.5 million pixels will do! (The "fine" mode on the PDR-M1 also uses a very conservative compression ratio, producing images with few if any JPEG artifacts, but lots of bytes!)

Other than a few of the earliest pictures in the Comparometer(tm), all comparison are taken with the absolute minimum compression setting the camera supports. (Actually, on the res target comparisons, we routinely include versions taken at different compression settings so people can see how the different cameras behave below max res - these are all so indicated in the links to the res pages, so you can tell which is which.) If you go to the "pictures" page for each camera, you'll find pretty complete descriptions of any adjustments made when the pictures were shot, as well as images shot with higher compression settings. We didn't include shot descriptions on the "carrier pages" for the images themselves, because it was just impractical to manage the information at that level. The "pictures" pages have been getting more detailed with recent cameras, you should find all you're looking for there.

-- Dave Etchells (web@imaging-resource.com), September 30, 1998.

Thanks for the answer, Dave. I still have some missing data regarding the difference in sample sizes- the Canon A-5, for instance, shows a size of 289K for the first image, for which the Toshiba shows 741K. The difference in number of pixels (not quite a factor of 2) doesn't account for the size difference, so the Toshiba must be doing less compression at its "minimum" than the Canon; the Canon still shows no compression artifacts as far as I can see, so I can only conclude that it's doing a better job at jpeg compression. Maybe their firmware is also responsible for the "zipper" effects some of the image processing choices (sharpness) apparently produce. If you have any further info on this, I'd be delighted to hear it- thanks again! Bob

-- Bob Ashforth (ashforth@zk3.dec.com), October 01, 1998.