Stylus 410 question

[ItsBruce]

I've got a Stylus 410 with an underwater housing. Between price, size, convenience, I really like it. However, I am having an issue with it on dry land. If I take a picture of a subject about 30 feet away in a well lit interior, the picture comes out just fine when the camera is zoomed out. When it is zoomed in on the same subject, the picture is underexposed. I should point out that the subject and background are neutral and zooming in should not fool the metering. Any ideas?

 

[justleesa]

hmmm....could you post a this and that way photo? I have the stylus 400 (which is pretty much the same, just w/o sound) and haven't noticed that

 

[ItsBruce]

These were taken with all the same settings and same location within a minute of each other.

Thanks for any help you can give.

 

[Charlie99]

If you look at the writing on the front of the lens you will see "5.8-17.4mm 1:3.1-5.2"

What this means is that the maximum aperture (F-stop) of the lens is 3.1 when wide angle and 5.2 when at full telephoto.

Edit: The EXIF data on your photos show 1/40 at f3.1 ISO200 for the wide angle, and 1/100 at f5.2 ISO250 for the zoomed in. (You can see some EXIF data by just in Windows XP by just putting your mouse cursor on the filename, then doing rightclick to properties.) By holding my hand over the lens and taking a photo with flash enabled, I found that the 410 has a minimum shutter speed of 1/100 when fully zoomed. This is an attempt to mimimize the camera motion induced blurring --- higher zoom means more blur for the same shutter speed.

Losing 2 f-stops on aperture and another 1-1/3 f-stop equivalent (factor of 2.5) on the shutter speed made the zoomed in photo underexposed. There is still a good bit of detail that can be brought out via levels in PSE3, but it is noisy. See attached.

The scene of interest isn't really illuminated by the flash so having the flash on doesn't help. With flash turned off, shutter speed will go at least as slow as 1/3 in the program auto mode (I just tested it by holding my hand over the lens so it's not clear that this is the limit). At the slower shutter speed you will have to hold the camera very still for decent photos, particularly when zoomed in.

 

[ItsBruce]

Wow, you all know a lot of stuff. Losing that many stops sure explains it. I'm still getting used to digital and didn't realize the lense was variable aperature... and that much slower than my zooms on my 35mm (as if I'll ever use them again).

I'm impressed with how you got the data by right clicking on the filename. That is particularly the case in that I first moved the files from the DX card to a Mac. Then I ran them through Graphics Converter to reduce the resulution and size to something that I could upload to SB. Then I re-saved them under a new name. Finally, I uploaded them. Yet it appears you could still get the exposure info. Cool.

And, thanks for the help. I'll put the thing on a tripod next time and ask the camera to overexpose. Then, I'll wait until there isn't a lot of movement in the subject.

 

[Charlie99]

And, thanks for the help.

Thank YOU for bringing something to my attention that I hadn't noticed before. It wasn't until looking at your photos that I realized that, with flash enabled, that the longest shutter time varies with zoom level.