Olympus SP-800UZ Samples

The crops below show the performance of the Olympus SP-800UZ next to the same ISO for the Fujifilm Finepix S100FS
Fujifilm Finepix S100FS. The Olympus reaches ISO 1600 while the Fuji reaches 3200 at full-resolution.

All crops below are 100% from their respective camera taken at the highest image quality setting available. ISO was set on camera, all other settings were left at their default values. These crops help determine which ISO settings can be acceptably used on these cameras. As noise increases, most cameras compensate with noise reduction which introduces softness. The point at which a print become unacceptably noisy is a matter of personal taste.

Olympus SP-800UZ	Fuji Finepix S100FS
ISO 50
ISO 100	ISO 100
ISO 200	ISO 200
ISO 400	ISO 400
ISO 800	ISO 800
ISO 1600	ISO 1600
SP-800UZ clearly lags behind the Fuji S100FS which pulls ahead by at about 3 stops in terms of retention of details and contrast. We can guess that the SP-800UZ 14 megapixels sensor is probably quite noisy and that Olympus had to implement some agressive noise-reduction which destroys details and local contrast.	ISO 3200