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Yup, I just found the ISO 1600 SOFT incompatibility. The good news on the settings changes is that the camera alerts you that it is making the change by showing the function in yellow.Thanks to Uwe for the suggested JPEG settings - I will give them a try.
Note that not all combinations of settings are available: e.g. if the ISO is set to Auto(1600), or even direct 1600, the SOFT option is not available for Shadow Tone - only STANDARD, MEDIUM HARD, and HARD (ISO must be 800 or lower, and the camera can not be in Program Mode for MEDIUM SOFT or SOFT to be available for Shadow Tone). In a bit of playing with settings, a couple of times I noticed that changing one setting resulted in another setting being changed or re-set. My brief perusal of the manual did not find any documentation of these restrictions.
Does this mean that you will always be working with 12mp and the camera will not use EXR mode?If you use camera JPEG images the in camera Picture Style settings are crucial.
Here are our Picture Style settings (for JPEGs):
Image Size: Large
Dynamic Range: 200%
Film Simulation: STD
Color: MID
Sharpness: M-SOFT (to avoid over sharpening with halos)
Highlight Tone: M-SOFT
Shadow Tone: SOFT (shows more open shadows)
Noise Reduction: LOW
These settings are made to allow the most options in your post processing. Blocked shadows and clipped highlights cannot be undone later.
There is actually a fairly long history for this sort of thing. At one time I had a Leica Digilux 2 with 7-22.5/2-2.4 and an Olympus E-410 with 14-42/3.5-5.6. The Leica sensor was near exactly a 4x crop, while the Oly was a 2x crop. Meanwhile, the two cameras were almost exactly the same size with the Leica zoom having the distinct advantages of better feel and lack of extension while zooming. It also slightly exceeded the Oly lens in terms of physical aperture at tele.Here's some interesting math: at widest setting the X10 lens has a 3.55 mm max aperture, and at longest setting the max aperture is 10.1 mm.
Compare this to a typical m43 kit zoom lens like the Panasonic 14-42/3.5-5.6, with 4 mm aperture at widest and 7.5 mm aperture at longest focal length.
Two conclusions from this (ignoring the fact that wide and tele ends have a bit different angles of view):
- X10 lens is able to defocus to at least the same degree as a m43 kit lens;
- X10 lens captures at least as much light as a m43 kit lens, which despite difference in sensor size should be reflected in sensitivity and noise levels being comparable. In theory, that is - for a given shutter speed a lower ISO can be used on X10.
I think that's what people are seeing in actual use?