How Fuji X10 handles shady areas

Photo: December 19, 2011. | flickr

This photo was posted to illustrate how Fuji X10 handles shady areas. The image was shot at iso 100, exposure compensation -0.3,  1/750 sec. Below is 100% crop from the original image. Noise reduction wiped out nearly all details in shade. IMHO, such areas will be a limiting factor for big prints, not orbs.

Actually, I think that Fuji X10 handles these regions quite good for compact camera. I checked some Olympus XZ1 images, and noticed similar pattern in shady areas. I think my Fuji images are better :-)
(Don't take it seriously, I just love my pictures :)). I would say the difference in image quality between so called premium compacts is not very big.

The DSLRs render details in shady areas significantly better than the premium compact cameras, and I suspect that in order to get good details in low contrast/shady area either the number of pixels should go down, or sensor should be bigger. I dream about compact camera with 4/3 sensor size and bright 4x zoom lenses...  Or any sensor size between 2/3 and 4/3 with no more than 12 megapixels...  Sweet dreams :)

NASA on flickr

I came across a NASA account on flickr. The photos are amazing, for example, the international space station with the Earth on background, futuristic robot-manipulator or Soyuz Rocket. Highly recommended.

Fuji X10, orbs, and human psychology

Photo: December 22, 2011 | flickr

It seems that Fuji X10’s orbs story is still going up judging from threads in the dpreview forum. I have the X10 for more than one month now, and we took nearly 2,000 pictures during this time. I found these white disks in one image, and wrote an ironic post about it. Well, I hope people would consider it as ironic. May be some other photos also have orbs, but I have not seen anything that would make me worry about it. Again, I do not shoot shiny chromo Harley Davidson motorbikes (or something similar) in bright sun.

I have not seen white disks in shots taken with flash, even on Cane toad skin. The photos of silicon bricks do have white spots but the same true for pictures from Olympus DSLR camera. But why anyone wants to shoot silicon bricks with flash?

Here is a picture of Hardy Tapioca on cloudy day. The exposure compensation was set to +1.7 in order to overexpose the sky. I have not checked this image extensively but at first glance the overexposure does not produce any orbs in such situation. IMHO, the camera handled the shot extremely well, without any prominent chromatic aberrations (see the 100% crop below).

I guess I can make obrs, too, but why? It is more or less obvious that in some situations (e.g., shiny surface in direct light) people need to be more careful. I doubt that orbs will be the limiting factor for me, even in "big prints". The mushy areas in shady parts of images are the bigger concern for me. But X10 is an advanced compact camera with small sensor, not DSLR.

What I don’t understand: why the orbs issue was blown out of proportion and so many people post orbs instead of explaining how to avoid appearance of white discs?