Nikon P1000 , problems with image quality or shaking ?

taipei101

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Good morning , Why this drastic difference in quality ? I have a Nikon P1000 , I took pics of the Cheetah with the factory settings and came out good ,
Cardinal8.jpg
Cheetah8.jpg
later I might have customized some settings in the menu. So last week I took pics of this cardinal bird and all the pics were so poor , was VR off ? Was it misfiring? I was leaning on a solid fence ,no wind ,very steady. The light conditions were better than the cheetah (cloudy ,hand held without leaning on anything )what settings could have been wrong? Is the camera suddenly defective ?
Thanks for reading
 
VR doesn't like when the camera is held rock-steady. When you mount your camera to a tripod, for instance, you're supposed to switch off the VR. Perhaps your steady hold on the fence was just too steady, and the VR was trying to make "adjustments" which weren't actually needed.

Perform a simple test to verify.
 
Thanks Designer , I suspected that ,last night I was shooting satellites with the tripod at 250th sec. and they all came out shaken , I'll turn it off tonight for the supermoon to test. (Wheather permitting )
 
VR is best when shutter speeds are slow...using VR at 1/500 or faster, or when the camera is "stable", can lead to blurring as the VR group/elements create what some call a "feedback loop"...
 
Thank you Derrel , I'm learning the hard way , this is my first Nikon since film .
I shot the Cheetah with the camera high above my head to avoid the Cheetah fence at the Philadelphia Zoo , it wasn't a high shutter speed as you mentioned ,so the VR worked well.
With the Cardinal the light was perfect but VR ruined everything because of the high shutter speed ,I was so disappointed as the cardinal was posing for me 2-3 minutes , did you enlarge the cardinal photo to see the kind o mini shake that was happening? I can see it .
Don't forget to shoot the supermoon tonight ,I hope you get a clear sky for that.
Cheers
 
I got a 70-200/2.8 VR in 2003 or 2004...I ruined a LOT of pictures that first summer by leaving VR ON all of the time..many of my outdoor, bright-light shots had subtle, weird blurring..but my slow-speed shots were fine...it was maddening!
 
Lucky you ,that's a fancy lens you got.
How long did it take you to find out VR was the problem ?
 
OK, you have a bridge camera. You may have entered into the digital zoom range. You can usually tell in the view finder because it giggles or shakes in the viewfinder, you can't keep it steady. In these moments, it's best to have a tripod and a corded remote release. Typically, those type of cameras will be good hand held up to about 300mm, it is marked on the lens barrel as you extend the zoom out. You may get lucky occasionally but the odds are not good. You should practice on a static object to see the limitations presented when you enter into a digital zoom range. This will advise you on future image making. It's a very capable image maker but it has it's limits. A decent tripod and remote release will really make this camera a better tool for long range work. Turn the VR off when mounted on a tripod.
 
Thanks jcdeboever , Yes I'm realizing the difficulties of long lenses ,even on a tripod , I'm gonna get a 3 way geared tripod head for smooth moving , and I already have the remote control which came with the Adorama kit but I haven't had time to set it up and learn it . I also got the App but my phone has some serious bluetooth malfunction that I haven't figured out yet .

To tell you the truth I couldn't see any shaking in the viewfinder with the cardinal, it seemed normal . but I definitely learned from you guys to turn off the VR for tripod use and for high shutter speed .
I'm so disappointed about the supermoon going on right now, it's so cloudy. I'm near the Washington bridge , I hope you are in a clear sky area right now.
good night
 
About the subject of the thread, the obvious camera shake, the P1000 can reach up to 3000mm focal length (full frame equivalent). The rule of thumb is that you can handheld 1/focal length (full frame equivalent) sec shutter speeds. So in order to handheld 3000mm without image stabilization you'd need a 1/3000 sec shutter speed. Thats almost the maximum shutter speed available (which is 1/4000 sec) and needs most excellent lighting conditions if the shot should be taken at base ISO.

So yes, this image clearly suffers from shake, but I dont think turning off image stabilization will be an easy solution, at least not if you're below 1/3000 sec shutter speed at the far end of the zoom range.





About the image quality, the P1000, being an extreme superzoom compact with a tiny sensor, is not able to actually archieve really high image quality, even under the best conditions.

Dont get me wrong - its absolutely amazing and mindboggling how much image quality Nikon actually managed given the conditions, and Nikon has proven their skill in both lens design as well as post processing to offer this level of image quality. They are clearly ahead of superzoom compacts from most other companies (except Fujifilm). Still in absolute terms the image quality archieved even under the best conditions is pretty mediocre, thanks to the very small sensor (1/2.3 inch, or 6.17x4.55mm) and its incredibly tiny pixels. Very likely the actual resolution would raise if they could make the pixels larger, unfortunately people blindly believe what you write on the camera, so 16 Megapixel it had to be, since thats kind of the lowest value people would accept at all.

Personally I'd had simply use the Sigma Foveon trickery and used a 3cmos construction, as it is known from some video cameras. Meaning the three colors R, G, B are split with color dependent mirrors and reflected on three separate sensors, one for each color.

Such 3cmos constructions need to be very precise and thus cant support too high resolution. However because one measures three color values in every pixel instead of just one, its actual resolution, not the usual propaganda. While the output of regular sensors with a color filter array only records one color per pixel and has to be post processed with what is called demosaicing, which tries to guess the missing color information. This process loses about half the official resolution, which is why the Megapixels specified on pretty much all current cameras are total propaganda.

Thus what can be done is using for example three 10.5 Megapixel sensors and already reach an effective resolution thats higher that you get from a 16 Megapixel sensor crippled in resolution by a color filter array. AND these pixels are larger and better. In fact the total pixel size you have available is now like five times the area from before, though this size has to be split between three different color channels.

Such a construction would be pretty expensive, due to the precision required - but this camera is already pretty expensive anyway, thanks to the large optics required for the extreme zoom range, even for a tiny sensor. I thus hope the extra expense wouldnt be such a problem.

Also, importantly, you can use the aforementioned Sigma Foveon trickery. That measn you can now legally write "31.5 Megapixel" on the camera. Because thats what Sigma does with their Foveon sensers, they add the pixels from the individual color channel, so a 15 Megapixel sensor turns 45 Megapixel etc.

It should be noted that Foveon sensors work very differently than having a 3cmos construction using color dependent mirrors. The Foveon technology actually lose a lot of light in their process and have frankly pretty mediocre performance, especially a lot of noise in the red color channel. Which is why using Foveon instead of regular sensors wouldnt solve any problem at all, even if Nikon had access to the technology (its patented).

A more realistic estimate for the resolution of a Foveon or 3cmos sensor with 10.5 Megapixels would be about 18-20 Megapixels. This varies a lot with the image in question. Especially an image thats predominantly red or predominantly blue will not archieve much resolution with a Bayer sensor at all, because only a quarter of the pixels record red and another quarter record blue.

However thanks to 3cmos these pixels are now much larger, of higher quality, than the 16 megapixel bayer color filter array sensor used before. And the demands to the lens have also been lowered, because the pixels are substantly larger now. This is especially important because the extreme lens is of course diffraction limited even wide open, which is f/8 at 3000mm, so the larger pixels directly result in more resolution anyway.

In the sum the effective resolution as well as the image quality would have been raised compared to the current solution.
 
Hi solarflare ,you make a good point about tiny sensors , I knew exactly that limitation when I got the P1000 but I couldn't resist having that kind of magnification in my hands , it gives me more creative opportunities and new challenges
I'm also a big fan of large pixels and low count that's why I dream to get the Sony A7 SII when I can afford it.
 

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