Do wide angle lenses degrade image quality in some ways?

Question

I checked out the canon ixus850 is brand (supposedly my first choice) and compared it with canon 900 TI. The former didn't exactly fit my expectation. I noticed the color wasn't that rich in normal settings compared to the latter, which is understandable since the latter boasts of its 10 MP. what confused me was when i tested the canon ixus 75. Ixus 850 and Ixus 75 both have 7.1 MP, but the colors of the IXUS 75 were more alive and rich than the ixus 850 is. Is that just because of the LCD screen? or is it the effect of having a wide angle lens?

Answer 1

If there's one thing I've learned after using a half dozen different cameras myself, it's that you should never rely on the LCD screen for anything important. These days, when I'm in doubt if I should delete a picture, I always view it on my computer screen first. The camera screen just doesn't provide a 100% accurate picture. So that could be the problem right there.

As for megapixels, that doesn't influence the colors at all. If a picture is vibrant or dull, it simply is (due to other reasons), and depending on the sensor you're using, you've either recorded it as 7 million pixels or as 10 million pixels.

Same for the wide angle - that only affects the field of view, not the colors.

There are a few things that DO affect the colors of course... Most importantly, the camera settings. If you dive into the camera menu, you can change stuff like saturation and sharpness. If you crank those settings up a notch, your pictures will really start to pop. And since all Canon cameras use the same software (more or less), you can create the same look with all Canons just by tweaking those settings.

I personally like to keep the camera settings flat and tweak my pictures as needed in Photoshop. If you don't feel like messing around in an image edititor however, just set everything to +1 or +2 in the camera.

The quality of the lens is another factor that influences the vividness of the final image. But all of the cameras you mentioned use pretty much the same quality lens, so I wouldn't expect a lot of variation due to that.

Answer 2

To make a lens this wide ranging you sacrifice quality typically in sharpness and in aperture compared to a prime lens (no zoom) or a high quality zoom lens with a narrower range. You will notice that the sharpness drops off mostly at the extreme ends of the zoom range and at the lens's widest aperture. The aperture allows the light through the lens to the camera. Wide range zoom lenses have relatively smaller apertures (a higher number). Practically, that means two things. Your shutter speeds are slower, so in lower light situations you have a higher chance for blurry pictures due to camera shake or subject movement (like sports action) - you may need to use a flash or raise your ISO to compensate. The second thing with a smaller aperture is a larger "depth of field," all else being equal. Ever see those nice portrait photos where the subject is sharp but the background is blurred? That's an example of depth of field. With smaller apertures, more stays in focus which means your backgrounds don't get that blurred look. There's a little more to it, but that's the basics. There can be other things too such as color fringing and chromatic aberration related to the usual lower quality of the lens elements themselves, but sharpness and aperture are the main ones I'd say. If you are shooting mostly snap shots or just want a good all purpose lens to take on a trip and aren't really serious about the photography side, then you'll probably be happy with a lens like this. You won't see a lot of sharpness issues on 4x6 prints, which is what most people stick in their scrapbooks and photo albums anyway. A decent lens in this range attached to an SLR/DSLR is usually much better than what comes with most point and shoot cameras and probably only very marginally worse than the "kit" lens that comes with most prosumer DSLRs (and sometimes better). If you start getting serious, then you'll probably have a collection of prime lenses and high quality zoom lenses and will be used to changing lenses based on what you are shooting.