So Bernard had one of these babies lying around. The Fujifilm Q1, a 2 megapixel camera. He’d never used it, and for good reason too; it was a lousy camera with pictures that looked like they came out of a webcam. And yes, it does have a webcam function as well. Or maybe it’s a webcam with digital camera functions.

Its macro mode was 60-120cm! That would account for all arm-held camwhoring. However, I then realized why my Fujifilm A202 had less shaky pictures compared to my later Canon Powershot A400 – its maximum shutter speed was 1/15th of a second, compared to the A400’s 1 second.

And here it is, with a Hoya R72 filter handheld; it automatically selects ISO200 (or ISO100 depending on brightness) with a fixed aperture of F3.5. It also has a fixed focus from 120cm to infinity. This was at 1/15th of a second, no post-processing, just resize.

In comparison, the Canon Powershot A520 needs a bit more than 1/4th of a second to get approximately the same exposure. However, the trees are brighter than the sky here; this could be because of wind giving the leaves motion blur. A histogram cannot be compared directly, because the Canon Powershot A520 captures a wider picture. However, it can be said that the Q1 is two stops more sensitive to IR light, and if the A520 would become 10 stops slower in shutter speed with the infrared filter on, then the Q1 would drop 8 stops.

And maybe, after operating on the Q1 to make it fully infrared sensitive like my webcam, I will buy an xD card for it, if I like the pictures. Hopefully, removing the IR cut filter won’t make it lose that much focus (not that it was ever good at that anyway.) At least the flash seems to give some infrared illumination, so I could use it in the dark, but not in macro, as flash cannot be enabled in macro. The xD card can then spur my lust for the Fujifilm F30, an upcoming point-and-shoot with good noise performance, going up to a digital SLR’s ISO3200.