.... bought a 12 Mp Sony digital camera from Currys yesterday and having taken a few photos and a movie, they look very poor compared to my ancient Sony 5 Mp camera.

Not sure the reason but will do a better side by side comparison.

Question is can I take it back to the shop and get a refund? Camera probably is working correctly just poor quality - will that be a good enough reason?

Anyone been through this type of situation i.e. bought something that works but is not up to scratch?

[Edited on 1/9/09 by 02GF74]

a good workman never blames his tools!


You may be able to get a refund under a 30day no questions garuntee

language timothy!

some of us are only young

Are you comparing them on the PC, not on the camera itself? It may be that the lcd isn't as good on the new camera.

In what way are they rubbish? Post some on here and see if anyone can recommend what might be causing it. I'd suggest as a start to check if it's set to the highest quality - if it's defaulted to crap quality to maximise the number of shots you can fit on your memory card, then it may well be saving at a lower resolution than your old camera is....

If there was something wrong with the optics, you'd likely see the same problem in each picture, so I'd imagine it's something to do with the settings...

HTH


Vince

Yeah take it back, if you want photos that are real good I reckon you'd need a DSLR nowdays.

As cameras are getting smaller and the 'pixel race' continues the CCDs are getting smaller inside but they are trying to fit more on them - if that makes any sense, and it's making picture quality rubbish, relatively speaking, compared to previous 'bulky' models.

My Fuji finepix2800 2MP from 2001 which is huge, outperforms my Panasonic Lumix TZ3 7.2MP from 2008 all day every day, it's amazing

In order to get the silly resolutions people buy them on (not required unless you are blowing up to poster sizes) they make the CCD cells on the silicon smaller and smaller. That means they are far more susceptible to noise (blow up a black area and see lots of blocky bits of colour). They often over compress them as well in order to fit the same number on the tiny cards they sell them with.

Try taking photos in bright sunlight (if you can find some), pictures will probably look great. Anything taken in overcast/indoors will tend to look worse than an old 2MP camera which has huge CCD cells compared.

DSLR's use much larger silicon CCD sensors so don't suffer so much.

which one have you brought ive just got the sony 12mp dsc w270 over the weekend and the picture is far better than my old olympus 7 mp camera on the little screen you cant tell any difference but when you play them on the flat screen in my living room you can tell the quality then and im sure they will be better if printed too.

I went through the same and was dissapointed with two new 10mb plus cameras compared to my old 1.3mb camera.

End result - a Cannon DSLR and I haven't looked back.

Absolutely awesome right out of the box, even just point and clicking.

Pat...

But unless you either know what you are doing or are willing to spend quite a bit of time learning dSLR is not the way to go. A prosumer point and shoot is the way forwards.
A dSLR on auto will produce a worse image than a decent P&S.

For cheap and cheerfull the Fujis are pretty good but canon all the way if you have £200+ to spend. (And from my experiance sony is crap below £150).

I'd agree, stay away from Sony as you're paying for the name. Go with canon etc, the brands who made their name the hard way!
As already mentioned most will perform well in bright light but they suffer when it's darker and you can't use the flash. eg night shots. An there is a lot of info at Steve's digicams and dp review websites!

I got a canon eos 450d reconditioned from canon, 1 year warranty on canons ebay store for about £320 which is over £100 less than new

Bollox - I use my DSLR as a point and shoot and don't really use much of what it can really do and my pics far exceed what my 10mb Fuji and 8mb Pentax could ever do point and click.

Pat...