How To View Images From A X10 Camera

Digital Cameras - Fujifilm X10 Test Images

Not sure which camera to purchase? Let your optics be the ultimate judge! Visit our Comparometer(tm) to compare images from the Fujifilm X10 with those from other cameras you lot may exist because. The proof is in the pictures, so let your ain eyes decide which you like best!

Still Life

This is our new "Still Life" test target. We're combining some of the elements from previous shots (DaveBox and Res Chart) into this and the "Multi Target" shot below, plus added a number of elements that are very revealing of various camera characteristics and foibles.

Here's what to expect for in this target:

Tone-on-tone detail & noise suppression: The textile swatches in the pinwheel were chosen because they evidence a lot of tone-on-tone particular, beyond a broad range of colors. This is just the sort of detail that noise suppression processing tends to flatten out. If you look at the item in these swatches as the ISO increases, you'll run across just where dissimilar cameras start to lose subtle particular. -- The white and tan swatches and the dark swatches tend to be particularly revealing of this. The label of the vinegar bottle (second from the right) is another great identify to look for lost particular from noise suppression, as the image of the person at the top of the label is actually a depiction of a mosaic. The dark colors in the background and in the figure's clothes contain particular that's very speedily lost when a photographic camera's noise suppression system kicks in. Cameras with really loftier-quality, low-noise sensors that require little dissonance suppression will be able to agree onto the detail in these areas, many others volition evidence only a uniform swath of smudged colour.
Some other identify where yous'll quickly see the effects of over-aggressive noise suppression is in the white salt grains of the common salt grinder in lower left. Cameras are oftentimes more than conservative about suppressing noise in highlight areas (because our optics tend to see less of it there), simply many cameras seem to have a hard time holding onto the subtle shadings that distinguish the salt grains from each other, peculiarly at higher ISO levels.
Fine Detail: You'll discover a lot of fine item in the label of the beer bottle on the correct, in its fine cursive text, only the other bottle labels hold a lot of fine particular as well. Fine text is often a proficient visual indicator of resolution, because our brains accept an excellent idea of what the text should wait like, so are very quick to notice fifty-fifty small-scale loss of detail.
For really fine item, look to the circular calibration/calculator on the correct side of the scene. Some of the fine lines in that location are extremely fine indeed. Looking at results from many different cameras with this target, we found that camera racket-suppression systems often misfile the fine lines with epitome dissonance, and then flatten them out. There'southward also a nice range of fine text sizes in this chart likewise, once more dandy visual cues for resolution and detail.
Highlight Detail: Iii elements in this scene show off (or show up) a camera'south ability to concur onto highlight particular. Equally mentioned above, the common salt grains (and reflections of the studio lights) in the salt manufactory are examples of fairly subtle highlight detail that cameras' anti-racket processing sometimes obliterate. The folded white textile nether the mug on the right side of the frame too shows a lot of white-on-white particular that is piece of cake to lose, particularly if a camera's tone curve is too contrasty. As it turns out though, the nigh sensitive test of a camera'south highlight abilities seems to be the hank of white embroidery thread in the upper right corner. These fibers are unusually brilliant and cogitating, so its like shooting fish in a barrel for a photographic camera to accident out detail in them.
Shadow Detail: Several elements of this subject are useful for evaluating shadow detail, specially the black mug and the pieces of folded blackness velvet, both under and inside the mug. The bottoms of the beer bottles likewise provide some gradations of deep shadow, and the clump of peppers in the lesser of the pepper oil bottle had a fair bit of detail that's far down at the shadow end of the tone curve.
Nosotros were actually surprised when we constructed this scene just how dark the velvet and sides of the beer bottles concluded up being. Fifty-fifty with the bright studio lights shining directly on it, the velvet in particular stays style, style downwardly at the shadow end of the tone curve. With almost cameras and on nearly monitors, the velvet will simply announced as an unrelieved swatch of black. To encounter whether it contains deep detail or not, in most cases you'll have to open the file in an image editor and heave the effulgence dramatically, to bring the detail up into a visible range.
Preservation of "Shape" in Potent Colors: As you approach the extremes of a camera's color gamut (its range of recordable colors), it becomes more and more hard for the photographic camera to evidence fine gradations of tone, considering one or more of the RGB color channels are close to saturation. It'south not uncommon to see a brightly colored piece of vesture or a vibrant blossom appear in digicam photos as just a blob of colour, because the camera ran up against the limits of its color gamut. The brightly colored embroidery threads in the upper right portion of the Even so Life target are adept examples of situations where this might happen. Pay particular attention to the bright red and dark blue colors here, every bit these are both colors well-nigh the edge of the typical sRGB colour gamut.
Color accurateness and white residual: Information technology'south pretty small-scale in there, only we've included a mini-MacBeth nautical chart, which displays very carefully controlled color swatches. Our Multi Target (meet below) sports a full-sized MacBeth chart, but the one here serves as a skillful check of color balance and rendition, and is as well useful for checking white remainder on this particular shot.
Paradigm noise and detail vs ISO: As mentioned in a higher place, this target contains many elements useful for evaluating detail loss to anti-noise processing. We'll therefore ever shoot a full ready of exam images of this target beyond each camera'southward ISO range, for every camera we test. (Run across below.)

ISO Series NR = Standard (Default)
ISO 100	ISO 200	ISO 400	ISO 800
ISO ane,600	ISO 3,200	ISO 6,400	ISO 12.8K

Multi Target

Our new "Multi Target" was first put into utilise in April, 2009, replacing the earlier "interim" pattern. This target incorporates a number of elements that combine aspects of the previous Multi target, also as the previous Viewfinder Accurateness or "VFA" nautical chart. Hither's some of what y'all'll detect in this target:

Framing marks: This chart evolved from the before Viewfinder Accuracy nautical chart, so ane of its major uses is to measure viewfinder accuracy. (See notes in the Viewfinder Accuracy section, at the bottom of this page, for more than information on this.)

USAF resolution targets: An important utilise of this target is in evaluating lens quality, looking how well sharpness holds upward as y'all move from the center to the corners of the frame. The little "USAF" resolution targets arranged at the center, in the corners, and along the diagonals are very useful for making fine judgements virtually blur, flare and aberrations in the paradigm. Nosotros generally prove crops of a USAF chip from a corner of the target and from the center, to show how lenses agree sharpness at wide and telephoto focal lengths.

Alignment "bullseyes:" We detect these graphics from the graphic arts globe (used to align sheets of picture show in the old film-based prepress days) very useful for seeing chromatic abnormality in lenses. The bold blackness/white elements are practiced for seeing the colored fringes caused by CA in the corners of the frame.

MacBeth ColorChecker Chart: This is nearly as mutual a color standard as yous can get these days, very widely available for just mildly exorbitant toll, and quite well controlled in its production. Information technology thus serves as a good basis of comparison betwixt cameras and between test setups. Imatest likewise understands the MacBeth colors very well, and uses them to produce its color accuracy map that nosotros feature in all our reviews.

MacBeth ColorChecker SG Chart: The ColorChecker SG chart provides a wider range of colors, to give a more detailed map of a camera's color handling. Nosotros haven't begun using this chart in the color-accuracy graphs we routinely offer, but expect to do and then at some bespeak in the future. In the meantime, we sometimes refer to this chart internally, to go a more complete idea of what a camera's color map looks like.

Log C/F Target: The progressive resolution design located only below the center of the target is a Log C/F (logarithmic contrast vs spatial frequency) chart. Digital camera noise reduction routines work by looking at levels of local contrast, flattening-out detail at progressively lower spatial frequencies every bit the local contrast decreases. (This is very commonly seen in human hair, grass, foliage, and other subjects with subtly-contrasting fine item.) This chart lets Imatest analyze only how a camera makes the tradeoff between contrast, detail, and prototype noise.

Colour Starbursts: The six circular starburst elements bundled around the target are intended to reveal de-mosaicing artifacts and colour-dependent resolution issues. The six starbursts provide examples of each combination of RGB colors intersecting each other. (That is, red, green, and bluish against black, plus red against green, light-green against bluish, and blue against red.) Given that the most common sensor RGB colour filter design (the so-called Bayer) pattern has twice as many dark-green pixels as red or blueish, you'll more often than not meet that the green/blackness starburst shows the best resolution, while the blueish/reddish ane shows the worst. The effects of different sensor geometries and color filter array patterns volition be revealed here.

Musicians Image: Synthetic test patterns only tell you so much. While nosotros take a lot of pictorial images in our other test targets, we thought information technology would be useful to include a small "natural" image here likewise.

4x Zoom Lens
Aperture	Wide Angle	Telephoto
Max	X10hVFAWB	X10hVFATB
f/5.6	X10hVFAWL	X10hVFATL

Resolution Target

Function of the impetus in developing the new Multi Target in April 2009 was to switch to using a new 2x target for the resolution measurements, since the original ISO 12233 nautical chart we'd used since the site first began in 1998(!) had become inadequate for testing the highest-resolution cameras. We'd for quite some time had a "homemade" 2x target, employing a shrunk version of the ISO 12233 chart, shot at i/2 size. The resolution numbers on that chart all needed to be doubled to convert to the actual values, though, so we decided to go with a commercial 2x target to eliminate possible confusion on the office of our readers. Numbers on this new 2x resolution chart at present read direct in hundreds of lines/moving picture height. (Because almost all of the area of this new resolution nautical chart is now meaningful for resolution measurements, there was no longer space on information technology to overlay the MacBeth and other color targets on our prior Multi chart; hence the simultaneous modify in our Multi target.)

(Max Res & Quality)	Wide Angle	Medium	Telephoto
iv,000 x 3,000	X10hRESW	X10hRESM	X10hREST

"Sunlit" Portrait
(This is our "Outdoor" Portrait test - read more than about information technology here.)

The lighting in this shot is deliberately awful, about what you'd expect from noontime sunshine here in the Atlanta, GA area. (In fact, the color balance has been chosen to pretty well lucifer the hazy sunshine here in mid-August.)

The reason for the harsh lighting is to provide a real "torture test" of how cameras handle conditions of farthermost contrast; and in particular, how well they exercise holding onto highlight detail.

Wait for:

Overall colour: Matching summer sunlight here in the Southward, the lighting in this scene is a bit more xanthous-tinged than that in many parts of the country, or in the fall or winter. - So there may be an overall warm bandage to the color. That said though, there's a fair range of color represented in the bouquet, presenting a tough challenge for the cameras. For some reason, the blue flowers seem particularly hard to handle, with many cameras rendering them as purple. (In real life, they're a low-cal shade of navy blue, with just a bit of purple in them.)
Skin tones: The overall slight warm bandage volition tend to leave the model's pare tones a chip on the warm side every bit well. Nonetheless, await to come across if her skin seems overly pink or if they have a too-brilliant tinge of yellow: Some cameras oversaturate peel tones (make their color too intense), leading to an near sunburned look. A footling oversaturation tin can make for a more "healthy-looking" complexion, but information technology doesn't take much variation for skin tones to look unnatural.
Highlight detail: When the model's skin tones are at a more or less normal level of brightness, how much particular tin can you see in her shirt? Does it blow out entirely to white, or can you still see the creases and folds in the cloth?
Overall contrast: Most consumer digital cameras produce vivid, contrasty images, considering that'due south what most consumers similar. Unfortunately, under bright sunlit conditions, many such cameras produce images with little or no highlight detail, and nighttime, plugged-up looking shadows.
Shadow detail: The area under the flower boutonniere is in quite deep shadow. Does the camera in question retain skillful item here, with low image noise? To meet, y'all may need to download the image and play with it in Photoshop(tm) or some other imaging program. Brighten the image, and see how far detail extends into the shadows. Photo printers are more often than not much meliorate at showing shadow item than are CRTs or LCDs, so yous'll want a camera that preserves skillful item here. The ability to heave brightness without encountering also much image noise is important if you ever have to "rescue" an underexposed prototype on the computer.
Detail in areas of subtle contrast: Most digital cameras employ some sort of dissonance-suppression to remove electronic noise from their images. Noise suppression is a good thing, only only if it'south not overdone. Too much noise suppression will "flatten out" subtle detail in areas of reduced dissimilarity. You can oftentimes see this in hair, where the private strands get blurred, and the paradigm takes on an almost watercolor issue. Look at the detail in the model's hair, and compare how it looks with different cameras in the Comparometer.

To view the entire exposure series from zip to +1.0 EV, run across files X10OUTAP0.HTM through X10OUTBAP3.HTM on the thumbnail index page.

Dynamic Range Serial
100%	200%	400%	Motorcar

Face Detection Series
Off	On	Automobile

Indoor Portrait, Wink

Normal Flash
Motorcar Exposure

This shot duplicates indoor shooting conditions in virtually Us homes, with fairly brilliant incandescent room lighting. The challenge here is for the camera'due south wink to blend naturally with the room lighting, and produce good, neutral color overall. - Some cameras will be overly afflicted by the room lighting, fifty-fifty with their flash enabled, and the effect volition be a strong orange cast. Another common failing is for the highlights from the flash to take on an unnatural blue bandage.

Finally, exposure is important here, and frequently a tough challenge for the cameras. The model's white shirt is central in the scene, reflecting a lot of the light from the wink correct dorsum at the photographic camera. As a consequence, nigh cameras underexpose this shot, and require some positive exposure compensation to produce a skillful result. - And that'due south an of import consideration in itself: Does the camera even permit adjustment of its flash exposures? Many practice non. These photos are a tough exposure challenge, if they come out OK, the camera in question can probably be coaxed into delivering a good flash exposure of whatsoever bailiwick within its range.

Note too, that the normal flash shot (as opposed to the slow sync one, if the camera offers that characteristic) will be sharply rendered, any bailiwick or camera movement frozen by the quick pop of the flash. That makes this shot a good 1 to look for the issue of over-aggressive noise suppression in the model's hair.

Indoor Portrait, No Flash

Automobile White Balance

Incandescent White Balance

Manual White Balance

The incandescent lighting used in most Usa homes actually has a very stiff yellow color to information technology. Our optics have an astonishing power to ignore color casts similar this, something digital cameras struggle to emulate.

The incandescent lighting used for this shot is thus not only very common here in the US, but also very hard for about digital cameras to deal with. While we probably desire a piddling yellowish color to remain in the prototype (to convey some of the mood of the original scene), too much will look unnatural and distort colors.

Most cameras' auto white balance systems have a great deal of difficulty with this shot, merely many incandescent white rest settings struggle every bit well. (Information technology seems that many cameras' incandescent settings are actually calibrated to the tungsten lighting used in professional person studio systems, which isn't nearly equally warm-toned as typical household lighting.)

If y'all intend to do much shooting indoors afterwards night, pay conscientious attending to this exam, as cameras vary widely in this regard.

To view the entire exposure serial from zippo to +1.0 EV, see files X10INBMP0.HTM through X10INBMP3.HTM on the thumbnail index page.

ISO Series
"ISO equivalent" refers to a camera's light sensitivity. ISO 200 represents twice the sensitivity of ISO 100, meaning that you lot tin use a shutter speed that's twice as fast. College ISO settings are frequently required to get any picture at all when shooting after nighttime, just fifty-fifty in full daylight, using a higher ISO can assistance you freeze fast activeness. The trouble is, increasing a digital photographic camera'southward ISO besides increases image noise. In practical terms, this means that higher-ISO images often can't be used to produce prints as large as lower-ISO ones. The tricky affair here is that high-ISO images often look much different when printed at various sizes than they do when viewed on-screen. In particular, for any level of image noise, y'all'll often find that while racket is quite evident at larger impress sizes, as you lot reduce the size of the prints, there will come a betoken where it suddenly ceases to be an issue. We routinely print loftier-ISO photos from the cameras we exam on our studio printer (currently a Canon i9900) at a range of sizes, and study our findings. If you're interested in investigating the effect of image noise for yourself, don't judge cameras' performance by how their images look on your CRT/LCD, viewed pixel-for-pixel. Rather, download the test shots linked in the table below and output them on your ain printer, then yous can meet how prints of diverse sizes will actually look.

I additional note about this item test series though: Because these images are shot under household incandescent lighting, the camera has to boost its blue-channel bespeak quite a flake to get back to a neutral color balance. Since the blueish aqueduct is generally the i with the most noise, this makes this shot a real acid test of dissonance performance. Noise levels in high-ISO shots taken under daylight atmospheric condition usually won't show as much noise. (See the "Far Field" test for examples of high ISO shots captured in daylight.)

ISO Serial
ISO 100	ISO 200	ISO 400	ISO 800
ISO 1,600	ISO three,200	ISO 6,400	ISO 12.8K

Business firm Shot

Similar several of our tests, these images are actually photos of a loftier-resolution poster, shot under studio lighting. The shots for this camera were captured with our third-generation House affiche, which was assembled from 45 carve up 11-megapixel images, shot with a very high-quality lens, and so stitched together into a single paradigm. The resulting image amounts to about 450 very high-quality megapixels. This should accept sufficient detail to comfortably challenge cameras up to at least lxxx-100 megapixels. (And even with higher-resolution cameras, nosotros believe that the camera lenses themselves would be more than likely to limit resolution than would the detail in the poster.)

Why did we choose to shoot a picture of a flick? The idea was to show a typical field of study (a firm and surrounding foliage) in a way that would be admittedly consistent from camera to camera. Any outdoor subject is going to vary considerably from day to twenty-four hour period, equally the lighting changes with the conditions, atmospheric atmospheric condition, and season. Shooting a poster lets us compare images from cameras shot weeks, months, or fifty-fifty years apart, with the sure knowledge that aught has inverse from i shot to another.

Things to await for here are fine detail, every bit seen in the foliage and tree limbs against the sky, sharpness in the corners, and the preservation of subtle detail in the shaded brick patterns. - Many cameras with overactive racket suppression severely mistiness the brick patterns that are in shadow.

Far Field Test two

While the House affiche in the shot in a higher place provides absolute repeatability from test to exam, it doesn't offer the range of brightness (dynamic range) that the original scene had, nor does it contain the about infinite range of fine detail found in nature. For these reasons, we shoot an outdoor photo of a building, to provide a more challenging (if more variable) subject for the cameras. Until Summer of 2011, we used the original house from the House poster for this "Far Field" shot, but the ever-encroaching copse fabricated it less and less useful. The coup de grace for that field of study was when the neighbor across the street relandscaped his yard so we could no longer shoot from our original position.

In place of the original house, nosotros've switched to using the Roswell, GA Metropolis Hall building, which offers many of the elements of the original Far Field discipline, just in a setting where nosotros're guaranteed access into the future, and without the threat of trees eventually obscuring the edifice. In this shot, nosotros wait at how the camera handles rendering of subtle detail (the bricks, both in the sunlight and in the deep shadows under the entryway roof), how it handles bright highlights (the white columns and reflections from the dome), and shadow item (in the dark areas beneath the shrubs on either side of the steps).

Note though, that because this is shot outdoors, the graphic symbol of the light is unavoidably going to alter quite a bit, depending on the atmospheric humidity and the fourth dimension of year. - You thus shouldn't rely on it for accented comparisons between cameras, since it's unlikely that conditions will be exactly the same from 1 test to the next.

ISO Series
ISO 100	ISO 200	ISO 400	ISO 800	ISO one,600

Highlight Tone Series
Soft	Standard	Hard

Shadow Tone Series
Soft	Standard	Hard

Dyamic Range Serial
100%	200%	400%	Auto

Pine

Our current Far-Field shot lacks one feature that we establish invaluable in the original one; namely the pine leafage that was in the background of the old discipline. The pine leafage provided very fine item that we could as well count on beingness the same year-round. No other shots we capture provided this combination of fine item at a distance, so we added a new shot ("PINE" in all the filenames) of a large pino tree near our function, shot at roughly the same scale as the pines in the one-time Far-Field shot, so comparisons can withal be fabricated against older images. Use this shot to see how well each camera handles really fine item, both in high-contrast situations (the needles against the sky) and in low-contrast ones (the needles against each other). The tangles of small branches confronting the heaven are also very revealing.

The combination of the FAR2 and Pine shots provide a wealth of information about cameras' epitome-rendering prowess with natural subjects shot at "infinity," filling testing needs that can't be entirely met with studio shots lonely.

Lens Zoom Range

Simply reading "4x zoom range" doesn't practice a lot to help you visualize what that means. It too says nothing regarding just how wide the broad-bending stop of that range is. To give you an idea of exactly what each camera's zoom lens does, we shoot this series of images, showing results at maximum wide angle, maximum telephoto, and telephoto with "digital zoom" enabled. (Note of class though, that so-chosen "digital zoom" just crops out and enlarges the cardinal pixels of the image, achieving increased size at the cost of reduced resolution.)

	28mm eq.
	54mm eq.
	112mm eq.
	2x Digital Zoom

"Davebox" Examination Target

Because most of its various elements are now contained or represented in the combination of the Nevertheless Life and Multi Target shots, we no longer routinely shoot the Davebox by itself, as would normally appear in this infinite. (We practise yet, still use it for our low light exam below.)

Macro Shot

Standard Macro Shot

Macro with Wink

Super Macro

Many are interested in close-up or "macro" photography. This test shows the best results nosotros could obtain using each photographic camera's macro mode. What to look for:

Minimum Macro Area: What's the smallest area that the camera can photograph? - We summate this and report on it in the Examination Results section of each review.
Softness in corners?: The images from near digital cameras go fairly soft when shooting in macro fashion. Some are better than others though, you can use the texture of the newspaper fibers or the details in the dollar nib to compare corner sharpness between models.
Wink functioning in macro manner?: Macro mode flash performance varies widely between cameras. Some tin can't throttle down the flash enough, others throttle down enough, just have very uneven lighting, while others accept lenses that project into the path of the flash, casting strong shadows. The Macro with Flash shot here volition bear witness y'all what to await.

Low-Light Tests

Depression light photography is an area where there are really enormous differences between digital camera models. This test starts at a light level about equivalent to typical city street lighting at dark (i foot-candle), and then progresses down from there, each successive test being at one-half the light level of the preceding one. You may besides encounter the issue of poor low-light autofocus in some of these shots, although we use a different test setup to cheque autofocus performance more directly. (The results of which are reported on in the master Examination Results section.) Things to look for here include:

Exposure limit: What's the darkest level a camera can handle at each ISO setting? If the leftmost images are reasonably vivid, the camera should practise fine with typical city dark scenes. If yous're shooting in the more dimly-lit suburbs, yous'll need a camera capable of producing skillful images i, two, or iii steps to the right of that.
Autofocus Limit: How dark can you shoot and notwithstanding get well-focused pictures?
White Remainder: Does the camera's white rest endure at low lite levels? (Many exercise.)
Dissonance Levels: Look at the photos, print them on your ain photo printer. How large a print can you make at acceptable quality levels, at various ISO settings and low-cal levels?
Detail loss to anti-noise processing?: Do details in the white gauze and even in the lettering on the examination targets suffer at lower light levels?

(Annotation: If you'd similar to use a low-cal meter to check light levels for subjects you might be interested in shooting, a light level of one foot-candle corresponds to a normal exposure of two seconds at f/two.8 and ISO 100.)

	1 fc 11 lux	1/2 fc 5.five lux	ane/4 fc two.7 lux	1/8 fc i.3 lux	1/sixteen fc 0.67 lux	1/16fc No NR
ISO 100	1.three southward f2.eight	2.five s f2.eight	5 s f2.8	10 s f2.8	twenty s f2.viii	20 due south f2.eight
ISO 200	0.6 south f2.8	1.3 s f2.eight	two.5 south f2.8	5 s f2.8	10 southward f2.8	ten south f2.8
ISO 400	0.three s f2.8	0.vi s f2.8	1.3 s f2.8	ii.5 due south f2.8	5 s f2.viii	5 s f2.8
ISO 800	1/6 s f2.8	0.3 s f2.8	0.6 s f2.viii	1.3 s f2.eight	two.five s f2.viii	2.5 s f2.viii
ISO 1600	ane/xiii south f2.viii	one/6 s f2.8	0.3 s f2.8	0.6 s f2.eight	1.3 s f2.8	1.3 s f2.eight
ISO 3200	1/25 s f2.8	1/13 s f2.8	1/6 due south f2.eight	0.3 s f2.8	0.6 south f2.8	0.6 s f2.8
ISO 6400	1/50 s f2.8	1/25 s f2.eight	one/thirteen s f2.8	1/6 s f2.8	0.three south f2.eight	0.3 southward f2.8
ISO 12800	1/100 southward f2.8	one/50 s f2.8	1/25 s f2.8	1/thirteen southward f2.eight	1/6 south f2.8	ane/half dozen s f2.8

Flash Range Tests

Digital photographic camera makers have gotten improve with their flash-range ratings. In the early days, many cameras had rather "optimistic" flash range specs, to put it politely. These days, the manufacturers seem to be toeing the line. (No incertitude at least in office because of tests like this.) Consequent with our philosophy of testing worst-case weather, this examination also involves some employ of each camera'southward zoom lens. Wink range is greater at wide angle focal lengths than at telephoto ones. If you lot're shooting at the broad bending cease of the lens' range, you might become better flash range than what's shown here. - But you'll never get a nasty surprise if you let the exam shots below be your guide to flash capability.

The examination target here is our "new" flash range/uniformity target, get-go put into service in April, 2009. To avoid potential exposure problems caused by the target itself, we've gone to a generally blank gray target, with a reflectance of 18% (matching the theoretical level that almost exposure metering systems assume for average scene reflectance). The white and black chips let us bank check white and black points in addition to the mid-grey of the target itself. The concentric circles are a visual guide for flash falloff, marking points 25%, 50%, and 75% of the way from the eye to the corners of the target. The bold black framing marks point the corners of either a 4:3 or 3:ii aspect ratio, for those shots in which we're checking flash uniformity. (Come across below.) For consistency of exposure, the target is mounted in front end of backdrop paper that also approximates a 18% gray.

Flash Range: Wide Bending
6 ft	7 ft	8 ft	nine ft	x ft	11 ft
1/30 sec f2.0 ISO 200	1/30 sec f2.0 ISO 200	one/30 sec f2.0 ISO 200	one/30 sec f2.0 ISO 200	1/30 sec f2.0 ISO 200	1/30 sec f2.0 ISO 200
12 ft	xiii ft	xiv ft	15 ft	sixteen ft
1/30 sec f2.0 ISO 200	1/xxx sec f2.0 ISO 200	i/30 sec f2.0 ISO 200	one/30 sec f2.0 ISO 200	1/30 sec f2.0 ISO 200

Flash Range: Telephoto
vi ft	7 ft	8 ft	9 ft	10 ft	11 ft
one/60 sec f2.8 ISO 200	1/60 sec f2.viii ISO 200	ane/60 sec f2.8 ISO 200	1/60 sec f2.viii ISO 200	1/60 sec f2.8 ISO 200	1/60 sec f2.8 ISO 200
12 ft	xiii ft	14 ft	xv ft	sixteen ft
1/60 sec f2.8 ISO 200	1/60 sec f2.eight ISO 200	one/60 sec f2.8 ISO 200	i/60 sec f2.eight ISO 200	1/60 sec f2.8 ISO 200

Manufacturer-Specified Flash Range

Lately, many manufacturers specify wink range with the camera set to Auto way, in which the camera is free to boost its ISO setting to help increase the flash range. This does increase the range, but it'southward like shooting fish in a barrel to take too much of a good matter: Too high an ISO can leave you with too much epitome dissonance. The variable ISO setting besides means that there isn't an easy way to compare the range with the stock-still-ISO shots in our standard flash range serial. So now, nosotros also exam the wink under the manufacturer-specified conditions (whatever they may be, but frequently with the camera prepare to Auto mode), and the look at both how brightly the scene is lit, and how much image noise is nowadays in the resulting images.

Flash range for SLRs will vary with the lens used (depending on the maximum discontinuity), so their flash range is commonly expressed every bit a Guide Number, or GN for short. The guide number is a distance, in either feet or meters, at a given ISO. To find the maximum flash range at a given aperture, simply divide the guide number past the aperture. For case, a guide number of 56 feet would translate to a range of 10 anxiety with a lens set to an aperture of f/5.six. The range would exist twice that if you had an f/2.8 lens (56/2.viii = 20).

Manufacturer-Specified Flash Range
Broad Angle	Telephoto
22.9 feet Machine ISO 200	sixteen.four feet Auto ISO 800

Flash Uniformity

The flash units on many digital cameras don't illuminate the scene very evenly, especially at wide bending focal lengths, then the photos here shows how uniform the wink coverage is. As noted earlier, this test uses the same target equally our flash range test, but for the uniformity tests, we take care to frame the target the same from camera to camera. The concentric circles on the target mark distances 25%, fifty%, and 75% of the style from the centre to the corners. (Approximate, they roughly split the difference between the 4:3 and iii:2 aspect ratios.)

Wink Uniformity
Wide Bending	Telephoto

Viewfinder Accuracy

Viewfinder accuracy is an important parameter, especially for shots where framing is disquisitional. The optical viewfinders on most digital cameras match the (poor) accuracy of those on film cameras, typically showing only about 85% of the actual terminal frame area. It's likely that this is a deliberate pattern choice by the camera engineers, to assistance avoid users accidentally cutting off the heads of their subjects. Nosotros disagree with this approach, or at least feel that it should be mitigated a bit, perhaps past increasing the accuracy to 90 to 95%.

Unlike the optical viewfinders, the LCD viewfinders on well-nigh digital cameras tend to exist quite accurate. There are exceptions though, so this test is still important.

Things to await for on this test chart are:

Optical/Electronic viewfinder accuracy: When nosotros shoot this target in the studio, we line things upward so the centre of the bright red outline on the target is just visible at the edges of the viewfinder frame. The resulting photo then very directly shows how accurate the viewfinder is. The fine blackness lines marker progressive increments of 1% of increased or decreased frame area. The assuming blackness lines mark 5% increments. The lines allow you lot become an approximate idea of frame accuracy visually, simply we measure the actual pixel dimensions to derive the accuracy numbers we report in our reviews.
LCD monitor accuracy: This is the same examination, but framed with the LCD monitor instead of the optical viewfinder. As mentioned to a higher place, LCD monitors are usually more accurate than optical viewfinders, specially in point & shoot digicams.