Most people tend to think of image stabilization as being mainly for telephoto lenses. While it's true that their longer focal lengths tend to magnify the effects of camera shake, image stabilization can provde a very useful assist at wider angle focal lengths as well; anyone who's ever tried to blur the image of a waterfall, while keeping the surrounding landsape tack-sharp knows exactly what I'm talking about.
At 35mm, we see excellent performance from the Panasonic 35-100mm f/4-5.6 lens: without OIS enabled, the camera-lens combination manages to take 100% sharp shots at 1/60 of a second; this is a little faster than we would expect, but then, the smaller camera-lens packages are actually a bit harder to keep steady because they lack the inherent weight. Turning on Mega OIS really helps, getting 100% sharp shots at 1/15s and 90% sharp at 1/8s. This equates to around 2.5-3 stops of hand-holding improvement.
 |
| Mouse over this chart to show results with IS activated. |
At the long end of 100mm, we'd normally expect to see 100% sharp shots at 1/125s (with the "one-over-focal-length" rule of thumb), but in this case we only see 100% sharp shots at 1/250s. Turn on Mega OIS however and we get some great hand-held performance: sharp shots all the way down to 1/15s, and 80% sharp at 1/8s, representing a hand-holding improvement of over 4 stops.
 |
| Mouse over this chart to show results with IS activated. |
IS systems tend to provide more benefit to less-stable shooters than very steady ones, so most users will see the same or greater amounts of shake reduction as we measured here. You can read more about our IS test methodology here: SLRgear IS Test Methodology, v2.
