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 18mm we see some useful improvement in hand-holding steadiness, about two stops: with OSS off we get around 50% sharp images at 1/15s, and with it on, this improves to 100%, and we get sharp images all the way down to 1/4 and even 1/2s.
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| Mouse over this chart to show results with IS activated. |
Zoomed in to 105mm, we see some very good results: over three stops of hand-held steadiness. As we'd expect we get 100% sharp images without OSS activated at the 1/125s setting, but with OSS activated, this improves to 1/15s, and 90% sharp at 1/8s.
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| Mouse over this chart to show results with IS activated. |
Additional text.
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.
