Smartphone camera and zoom compact compared: Nexus 4 vs. Panasonic DMC-FS40

My daughter uses a cheap Panasonic compact camera. It is a 14Mpx DMC-FS40. Just for fun I decided to compare it against my LG/Google Nexus 4. I was surprised to see how good the phone held up against the compact camera. To see the rest of the images I took with the Panasonic, check out the Google+ album.

The Nexus 4 is on the left, the Panasonic on the right. Without processing in Lightroom, the color balance is a bit too cold.

Since the picture is taken in warm evening light, I adjusted the color balance on both images to reflect this and I set the blackpoint and whitepoint, which weren't too far off on both originals.

Below are 100% crops of both images compared. You can see that the straw is a bit sharper on the Panasonic. The hair in the Nexus 4 image also suffers quite a bit from noise reduction.

In the detail of the chair at the table behind us it appears the Panasonic has more depth of field. The Nexus 4 took the shot at 4,6mm at f2,65 and 1/40s and the Panasonic used 5,7mm at f2,9 and 1/60 sec. Since the angle of view is about the same, we can conclude that the Panasonic has a bigger sensor and the depth of field should be smaller at the same angle of view. Interesting. I assume the difference in the sharpness of the chair is a combination of less noise reduction and the sharper lens of the Panasonic.

The glass clearly shows that the Panasonic is sharper. The red around the letters is also rendered much better.

The biggest difference is noticeable in the green trees in the background. The sharpening + noise reduction of the Nexus 4 ruined this area of the image, whilst it holds up fairly well on the Panasonic. Also notice the difference in sharpness of the hair.

The jacket does not show that much difference (sorry for left/right reversing the images in this comparison: the Nexus 4 is on the right this time). There could have been subject motion on the panasonic image or there could be a difference in focal points.

Conclusion

The compact camera is one of the cheapest you can get (at around €60) but still it offers an improvement in image quality over the Nexus 4. If you zoom out it also has a wider field of view than the Nexus 4, which is definitely a plus. So it still pays of the use a compact for day to day snapshots.

I actually got interested in how a compact camera performs since I registered for the #GalaxyS4ZoomBE test in Belgium: 500 people get to test the Samsung Galaxy S4 Zoom, which is a hybrid smartphone/compact camera. The camera part should exceed the quality of the Panasonic I used, so that will become an interesting test!