Other than obvious problems (such as inaccurate focussing), Danny Young (nzmacro) (Steve's Digicam, Panasonic forum, 24 April 2004) suggests...
Digital cameras with the smaller lenses (physically not focally) and the ccd's {charge couple devices, the digital sensor, like `digital film'} need and love light, more so than film, it needs to be spot on, or noise and softness becomes very apparent.
{Picture below taken by nzmacro, `Falls98', from his New Zealand gallery}
And why do digital cameras have `noise'? John Ewing (Yahoo!, FZ10 forum, 27 September 2004) explains...
It's all to do with heat. Once the detector heats up it starts generating spurious pixels (maybe because these things detect infra-red and when they heat up they start emitting it themselves?) How much they heat up depends on the voltage they draw and the time they draw it for -- and also how good the cameras are at getting rid of it. The voltage is also proportional to the desired sensitivity -- the higher the voltage, the greater the ISO value, so selecting higher sensitivity to avoid a longer exposure is somewhat self-defeating. You may manage to sneak in a short exposure before the chip gets too hot -- I don't know if a linear scale applies here or not. It's probably exponential, with meltdown at the top end.
Generally, the bigger the mass of metal available to act as a heat sink, the better the noise performance. Astro cameras, which sport cooling vanes and even water cooling, can make exposures lasting for hours on end. Low-end cameras with no real provision for cooling have trouble making it to 1/4 sec.
If you want to do really long exposures, you can always try taking sequential shots and stacking them.Steve `sdwsp' (Steve's Digicam, Panasonic forum, 24 April 2004) adds...
When the FZ10 first came out last November {the northern winter}, shorter days and weather kept folks inside and the resulting {pictures} caused them to wonder about the camera's low-light capabilities and noise. Now that the Fluzi is going outside {during the spring/summer}, it's in its element and the `wow' factor shows...After reading posts both here and in dpreview it seems like the FZ10 varies in quality from camera to camera.It is possible to set the FZ10 to `sharp' picture mode. This makes the FZ10 do post-processing on the pictures it takes (and does not change the FZ10's optical qualities). Some users prefer to do post-processing inside their computer rather than let the camera do the post-processing. Post-processing can be done with programs such as GIMP, Photoshop or NeatImage.
