More Camera Comparisons
Here are a set of comparison photos between my old Pentax and the new Lumix. This first photo is a low-light, non-tripod photo of our "orange room." The "orange room" is my standard for measuring noise, since it seems to show up so well in orange. The most obvious difference in the two photos is that the Pentax has less color/saturation than the Lumix. The Lumix is truer to real. The Lumix also has a wider field of view.
The capabilities as a starry nighttime sky camera are very clear. The Lumix beats the Pentax hands down. The Lumix is set with a 30 second shutter in this photo (but could go as high as 60 seconds). The Pentax shutter speed cannot be set, but the mode for Nighttime shots only opens the shutter for about eight seconds.
Here are two enlargements of the "orange room" pictures. I'm not really sure what the comparison is here. Up close, it looks like the Pentax has better detail, but more noise (look in the orange). Maybe the Lumix does a digital blur to reduce noise. In fact, maybe that's all the image stabilizer is doing--doing Gaussian blur post processing on the image.
Here are some more photo samples from the camera today. I think the color tones in the Lumix camera are really rich. The blues, greens and reds are much truer in the Lumix than in the Pentax.
