Paul's Pages issue 137 (March 98)

Agfa Photo 1280 digital camera picture samples.

 

This month I've tested Agfa's Photo 1280 digital camera (for details, see Brief Encounters, PC Plus issue 137). The camera itself looks and feels cheap, but the picture quality is brilliant, and that's what counts. Here are some examples - they've been cropped and/or resized to make them download-friendly, but they're otherwise unretouched. Also, here are details of something I missed in the Agfa's bundled software.


Agfa1.jpg (53676 bytes)

Like all the best digital cameras, the Agfa 1280's results look like scaned photos rather than still-frame video grabs. The 3:1 zoom lens makes an enormous difference to the range of compositions available.


Agfa2.jpg (33731 bytes)
The flash is good and powerful, with three modes (normall, fill-in, redeye). Note how well the strands of hair are resolved in this pic - a sign of the quality of the Agfa's lens.



Agfa3.jpg (59857 bytes)

Like Fuji's cameras, the Agfa 1280 behaves like a conventional film camera in poor light (i.e. it doesn't have the extraordinary, video-like low-light performance of, say, a Sony). However its colour resolution holds up well even when things get murky.


Agfa4.jpg (30256 bytes)A small touch of video-like flare on the cheek here (although I doubt if many 35mm SLR cameras would do any better unless  carefully filtered). Other than that, it's a great result in complex light conditions. The 768 X 1024 original contained 151,454 colours.



Agfa6.jpg (31299 bytes)
This picture was taken in the murkiest of light, through a car windscreen (it was blowing storm Force 10 at the time, and I couldn't hold the camera still outside!). The original looked like this:

Agfa5.jpg (4086 bytes)... but the PhotoWise software bundled with the Agfa did a brilliant, one-click 'quick fix' brightness/colour adjustment, and its variable sharpness filter crisped things up. PhotoWise, which also handles downloads, is the best bundled software I've seen with a digital camera.



Finally, the bit I missed...

Agfa7.jpg (43184 bytes)
I rated Agfa's bundled PhotoWise download/editing software the best I've seen, but there was even more to come (and - shame - I didn't even notice it until after PC Plus had gone to press).

Last summer I had great fun hand-stitching pictures together in Paint Shop Pro to form panoramic views. The Agfa Photo 1280 comes with PhotoVista, a program which does the job much better, automatically - as in this four-picture stitch-up of Bath's beautiful Royal Crescent (scroll horizontally to see it all). That's not all though - PhotoVista can also create 360-degree panoramas, and comes with a viewer application that lets you 'drive' around them, like the panoramas in Microsoft's Encarta 98. It also has a Win 95 screen saver application, which pans round the panorama automatically.

The panoramas are standard .jpg files, so you can print and edit them (I shrank this one to web-friendly size using Paint Shop Pro). Full-size 360-degree images are big (around 800K), so no use for the web. However the viewer application can be downloaded free from www.livepicture.com , so you can send panoramas to people on floppies for local viewing. The viewer pack also includes plug-ins for Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer, although the ones I downloaded didn't work with release 4.0 of either browser.

PhotoVista works with any image files (so you can scan in ordinary photos), and you can buy it as a commercial product. Check Livepicture's site (link above) for details. Their UK distributors are IMC Distribution, tel: 0344 872800, fax 01344 872868. No web site, but emails to sales@imcnet.com.


All photos and text Copyright (C) Paul Stephens, 1998.

Back to menu.