Panasonic Lumix DMC-ZS25 vs. L5/Millipixels

Continuing from my Xperia vs. Millipixels comparison…

Cameras

Conditions

  • Harsh midday light (10:30-11:30am)
  • Poor to average screen visibility
  • Operator errors (various)

Device/app Settings
Lumix
Set to 14MP
Full automatic

L5/Millipixels
13MP
Manual controls: Gain, Exposure, Balance, Focus (default focus not adjusted for following images)

Lumix / Millipixels
Full sun:

Lumix / Millipixels
Bright sky:

Lumix / Millipixels
Shade:

Lumix / Millipixels
Shade:

Lumix / Millipixels
Shade:

Lumix / Millipixels
Shade:

Lumix / Millipixels
Shade (Oops…mismatched framing):

Lumix / Millipixels
Full sun:

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Interestingly the Lumix seems to struggle a bit in full sun, erring slightly on the side of overexposure. On the other hand, in those same shots the Librem 5 is too dark in the darker parts of the photo.

The shaded photos are mostly OK on both cameras.

With the fourth one down, there is a discernible difference in the purple colour of the flower. I would be curious as to which one is closer to reality (albeit that you can’t account for differences in the monitors used by Purism customers, or differences in their eyes for that matter :slight_smile:).

The bright sky photo on the Librem 5 feels not as well-focussed and also the sky itself seems to exhibit some kind of artifact.

I noticed the Lumix’s overexposure, too. I think it’s probably typical of automatic mode, especially for mass market cameras and phone cameras. The shots from the L5 suffer from my inexperience/inability to tweak the controls to “just right.”

For the 4th photo montage, the blue color was more accurate. (As for the L5’s purple, my fault, as usual.)

I didn’t try to adjust focus for any of the shots, as I tend to make it worse most of the time.

The Millipixels app really needs more-responsive-in-real-time sliders; right now things are kind of jerky and hit-or-miss, which is why it’s so hard to find the right settings.* Especially in sub-optimal viewing conditions. Still, the devs have done a great job so far with the app.

*And maybe reduce the range for Gain and Exposure along the slider, because it sometimes feels like I’m trying to make intricate adjustments within a tiny pinpoint location on the scale. Having slightly larger movements of the slider equate to small adjustments in Gain and Exposure might improve the usability.

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All sliders can switch from coarse to fine-tuning mode by long pressing their handle (that seems to be a standard GTK feature). For focus, I’ve recently made a change that makes its slider non-linear, which helps me set the focus right a lot, but this doesn’t make sense for other parameters (it’s not released yet though).

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Cool. I didn’t know that. Learn something new every day.

I won’t describe the process I used to get color correction matrix we’re using right now because it will make anyone who has any idea about digital photography pull hair out of their heads. Let’s just say that we still need to get a proper calibration sample :smiley:

We still need lens shading correction to fix this vignetting.

Good thing about things like color calibration and lens shading is that it can be easily added retroactively to photos taken in the past (well, as long as you keep your DNG files around :))

This kind of high dynamic range photos is the hardest to make look good for me personally when it comes to L5 - but I bet that having 10-bit depth supported will make it better.

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If you enable HDR in a camera, you may get: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-exposure_HDR_capture

Maybe a future iteration of the Librem 5 software will do auto exposure bracketing and then produce the combined result.

I find that on my iPhone, HDR works as advertised but the result can sometimes look fake i.e. the brain can sense that something is not quite realistic.

That works in addition to (alongside) 10-bit (or higher) depth, although many people won’t be able to display 10-bit depth.

Displaying 10-bit depth isn’t important at all, it’s about having that data available while developing the photo, so you have much greater breathing room for exposure compensation and highlight compression.

BTW. I know that our selfie cam has some HDR features (which of course we’re currently not using at all :stuck_out_tongue: ), not sure about the big cam though.

[edit] Selfie cam has “line-interlaced long-short output for iHDR (inter-line HDR)”, I don’t see anything for the big cam though (so seems like it would need to have multi-exposure capture done in software)

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Well…that’s good to know. Thanks! :+1: :rofl: