Image quality reducing

[Iain]

I have been looking at some of my older images and they are brilliant and sharp, of late they seem to have deteriorated and I am at a loss as to why, focus is good but when enlarge they appear blotchy.
Do the memory cards deteriorate with age therefore causing this problem? or any other factors.
The lens is spotless and the focus is OK, I have even tried manual focus but to no avail.
Camera is the Fuji S7000 Digital SLR.

[wheelinround]

I have been looking at some of my older images and they are brilliant and sharp, of late they seem to have deteriorated and I am at a loss as to why, focus is good but when enlarge they appear blotchy.
Do the memory cards deteriorate with age therefore causing this problem? or any other factors.
The lens is spotless and the focus is OK, I have even tried manual focus but to no avail.
Camera is the Fuji S7000 Digital SLR.

Apparently memory cards do deteriate I found this out only recently.
Memory chips have different speeds to process at, slow batteries,dirty or damaged conetors o dirt in the female section, and internal dust or mould could be causing the problem on the lens.

Not sure how you remove images from your card but after a total clean out how often do you format.???
If you know how you are able to used Windows Scandisk to check for bad sectors etc to much formating can also damage them same as Hard drives.

Static will cause damage to memory chips and over heating.

Ray

[bitingmidge]

Have you changed the jpeg compression setting?

P

[Grunt]

If the memory card was deteriorated then you probably wouldn't be able to use it at all.

Your camera has a whole lot of software inside that does sharpening and saturation adjustments. Do you have control over these? If so does that help.

Can you post a link to a full size image so I can have a look see?

Chris

[zenwood]

Need glasses? ;)

[scooter]

I wonder does the sensor in the camera deteriorate?

[Grunt]

Need glasses? ;)

I told him if he didn't stop he'd go blind.


I wonder does the sensor in the camera deteriorate?

Yes, but I would imagine you would end up with dead pixels rather then the entire image appearing blotchy. The sensors have tiny little colour filters over each of the pixels. Over time the colours can fade as the filters fade.

[woodbe]

The memory card is just storage for whatever the camera puts there. It doesn't suffer from the sort of deterioration film does. If it breaks, you lose all of the photos...

The deterioration could be due to a number of things, but most likely, the jpeg processing or the ISO has been changed, and changing it back may well recover the missing quality.

Can you post a sample of a good and bad image?

Woodbe.

[Iain]

Had a fiddle thisafternoon, did a reformat, camera does that for me and found that the settings had changed to 3mp, that would explain a lot.
The image was OK until I wanted to crop something out, now that 3mp rather than 12mp would explain a hell of a lot.
I'll take a piccy and blow it up and see what happens, apart from that I can't post a full size image or even email one, far too big.
Thanks for the advice but I had a feeling that I had seen somewhere that memory cards can lose their edge after a while.
The card is a Scandisk 512mp XD.
Sean, the sensor is CCD, far more reliable than CMOS, I have not had one let go yet in any of my cameras.

[Master Splinter]

Memory cards may deteriorate with age (a limit of about 100,000 write cycles); however this isn't going to effect information stored on them in a way such as a photo loosing sharpness.

If you have had loss of information in a picture, you'll find that it will either not open at all (with an error message like "cannot open the file as it appears to have been damaged") or specifically in the case of a jpg, part of the image may just be grey if the file has been truncated. (the data to describe the file type and the size of the file still exists...but the data for the image runs out partway through so the whole image can't be drawn).

You could be seeing the results of re-saving the image as a jpg too many times. Jpg is a lossy compression scheme, which means that if you are in the habit of opening the file in an image editing program and then saving it somewhere else (rather than just moving the file or doing a copy/paste), you are loosing data as the already compressed image is subject to another round of lossy compression.