4. Blue Sky

A camera’s signal-to-noise ratio is important for capturing accurate skin tones, but it is of equal significance for capturing outdoor shots, such as with the image with blue sky here from the E-420.

The sky is a deep azure, devoid of cloud cover. It is one continuous tone, and not two or three shades of blue sky, which would indicate an elevated noise level. This is a very important aspect to the camera you select—especially if you are going to be making prints of your images. Camera noise means that you will start to notice an increasingly variegated sky as you make larger and larger prints, Since the E-420 has a ten-megapixel sensor, you should be able to make prints larger than 8x10. In our opinion, even 11x14 and 16x20 prints are well within the capability of this camera. For this attribute, we give the E-420 a rating of four out of five.

In the SP-565UZ’s picture of the white house, the blue sky at the top of the image appears to be made up of several different shades of blue. This splotchy appearance is the result of elevated noise ratios. With well over ten years of digital camera experience, however, Olympus should have been able to generate a solution to the SP-565UZ’s noise problem. We have the ability to correct this deficiency in Photoshop—up to a certain point—but it would take an inordinate amount of time to do so.

We would be hard pressed to recommend generating prints from images captured by the SP-565UZ at over 4x6 inches in size. If you were to print out an 8x10 or larger picture, the image quality would likely show obvious degradation. Color fidelity might appear presentable throughout the print, but the noise level problem would stick out like the proverbial sore thumb. Because of this, we rate the SP-565UZ at a two out of five for this attribute.