I know very little about digital cameras. I do know, however, that my Olympus D490 takes great pictures. And they take up way less than 1mb.

So I decided to get a new camera - the Canon SD600. There are a shitload more settings than I know what to do with, but I have noticed the quality of picture is not nearly as good as the Olympus.

Picture taken on middle quality setting with the D490



Picture taken on high quality with the SD600



I feel the SD600 photos are too grainy. Is there a way to remedy this?

 

The SD600 photo doesn't look like it's in focus. The Oly photo, while focused and with a tremendous depth of field has pretty bad white balance and very little shadow detail.

Can you provide more info on the settings used? I've got an SD550 and think it takes pretty darn nice pictures for its size.

 

From what I can figure out I have the ISO on Auto, the medium 1 pixel setting, and flash.

 

Do you get different results with largest pic size and superfine detail?

 

I haven't tried that, but I don't really want to take a 5mb picture when the D490 gets better pictures while using a fraction of the space. I'll play around with it more and see if I can find a setting I'm happy with

 

With these down-sized pictures, you can't see any graininess. You'll need to crop a piece of each photo out and show us those to compare. Plus, the two photos should be taken from basically the same location/angle so that you can more directly compare how they handle lighting.

It looks to me like the top photo is underexposed, but at least it's sharp. The bottom one looks a tad soft; perhaps the light was low and it was hard to handhold?

Providing details like shutter speed, ISO, etc., would help to diagnose what's going on. You should be able to get that info by looking at the "EXIF" info. in a paint program, or probably right-clicking and looking at the Properties/Summary/Advanced screen in WinXP Explorer.

 

zoom could also be a factor with these two pics.

It is best, like vidgamer mentioned, to take two mostly identical pictures with the two cameras and then compare the results.

If your priority is small sized pretty good quality pictures, then I don't think you need an upgrade.