The image above was taken with the Canon PowerShot A3400 IS. The lens was set to its maximum wide angle position at 5mm to provide an equivalent field of view to the 5-25mm lens on the PowerShot A2300. In Program auto mode the camera metered an exposure of 1/200 at f7.9. The original JPEG image size was 4.42MB. The crops are taken from the areas marked with red rectangles and presented here at 100%.

Image stabilisation on the A3400 IS was disabled and i-Contrast was left in the default off position on both cameras. Before I analyse the 100 percent crops I just want to briefly talk about the aperture selected by both cameras and its effect on image quality. Both the A2300 and the A3400 IS selected an aperture of f7.9 in Program auto mode. An initial test shot I made with the A2300 selected an aperture of f2.8, but subsequently the A2300 steadfastly refused to budge from f7.9 (implying the choice of just two aperture settings). The A3400 IS selected f7.9 for every shot, so lacking a pair of f2.8 shots for comparison and with no aperture priority mode to force a wider aperture, for a fair comparison I’ve compared crops from the f7.9 exposures. But it’s also only fair to point out that the quality of the single f2.8 exposure from the A2300 is visibly better than these f7.9 crops which suffer noticeably from diffraction.

Aside from the diffraction issue the most noticeable thing about these crops is the low level of detail and the clumpiness of the pixels. All of these crops look quite heavily processed and there’s quite a noticeable degree of texture in areas of flat colour. In the first crop a lot of the fine detail in the chapel walls and the foregound has been obscured by this clumpiness.

The second crop looks a little better. The lighthouse is discernible as a white column and the edges of the window frames are reasonably well defined. But the processed look persists, and there’s stiill a lot of texture in the top half of this crop where there shouldn’t be any. I would expect to see more detail in the foreground roofs. The detail in the third crop from the edge of the frame fares no worse, but there’s a hint of a red fringe along the vertical edge of the window frames.

The last crop from close to centre of the frame is the best in terms of definition with reasonably well defined edge detail, I’d hesitate to call it sharp, though, as once again the clumpiness makes everthing appear as it was viewed through a dirty window. It’s worth pointing out that at typical screen sizes you’re unlikely to notice this pixel clumping and loss of detail, but if you plan on making large prints, or radically cropping your shots it could become an issue.

Interestingly, the PowerShot A3400 IS crops compare quite favourably with the PowerShot A2300 which shares the same sensor and lens (though it isn’t stabilised). Unless the unstabilised optics of the A2300 are poorer in some regard, this implies a difference in the processing. There’s no question, though, that the clumping in evidence in both sets of crops isn’t so bad on the A3400 IS ones. The areas where the difference is most clear are the chapel in the first crop, the lighthouse and the foreground roofs in the second one everywhere in the final crop.

To see how these models compare at higher sensitivities check out my PowerShot A3400 IS Noise results.

To compare noise levels under real-life conditions I shot this scene with the Canon PowerShot A3400 IS and PowerShot A2300 within a few moments of each other using their best 16 Megapixel resolution at each of their ISO sensitivity settings.

The cameras were set to Program auto exposure mode, the lenses were set to the same field of view and the ISO sensitivity was set manually.