Inside Story

The big changes from the GX100 are a CCD (imaging device) with about 1.2x more pixels and the Smooth Imaging Engine III that serves as the camera's image processing engine. "The captured image data is higher resolution and the engine that processes that image was upgraded, so we developed the software to make images more beautiful," tells Maki.

An image processing engine is a purpose-specific semiconductor that could easily be called the heart of a digital camera because it processes the electric signals sent from the CCD and converts them into image data. How well that performance is brought out is seen in the skill of the software development staff.

"We struggled considerably with how to set fundamental quality," tells Takuro Naito who was in charge of picture quality design. "As a result, picture quality maintains the resolution from the center to the peripheries and there is low noise on top of that," he adds.

However, there is always the risk of "expressionless image quality" because resolution is lost in a tradeoff with noise reduction. "The adjustment was hard," notes Naito. "With some subjects, you get a sense of texture with no more than the necessary level of noise processing. So, we incorporated a feature that lets users turn noise reduction on/off. And, it can be turned on/off automatically at user-selected ISO's." Incorporating these capabilities made it even more interesting as a digital camera.