Camera Reviews: Automatic Stabilisation Tested

We've decided that we'll no longer be manually adjusting the stabilisation settings when testing digital cameras unless we really, really have to. From now on, cameras will have to make the right choices all on their own!

Stabilisation is a great feature in a digital camera, as it compensates for the tiny movements your hands inevitably make when holding a camera. You can therefore capture still-life scenes in low light without the camera pushing up the ISO sensitivity setting too high (don't forget that stabilisation only compensates for your movements, not your subject's movements).

This can, however, cause problems when you decide to use the camera on a tripod. Since the tripod is perfectly still, the stabilisation system doesn't detect any movement ... which sometimes sends it haywire. In the early days of integrated stabilisation, it was widely accepted that you had to switch off stabilisation when using the camera on a tripod, otherwise unwanted movement of the stabilisation system would make a photo that should look razor sharp come out blurred. We therefore systematically switched off this function before taking a picture of our test scene with the camera on a tripod.

Times have changed, though. Over the last few years, stabilisation specialists have started equipping their cameras with various functions that allow the system to automatically adapt to the conditions in hand. In other words, the stabilisation can switch itself off automatically when the camera is mounted on a tripod, work vertically only when it detects a horizontal panning movement, and use the exposure time to find the best compromise for capturing a moving subject, for example.

These days, functions like this are sufficiently commonplace to be considered normal. Any stabilisation system worth its salt should therefore be able to detect when a camera is still or when it's being rotated and adapt to these conditions.

We've decided to change our test procedure slightly to take this into account. From now on, we'll leave the stabilisation system in its default mode for all the tests we carry out, including those with the camera on a tripod. For optical stabilisation systems with a switch on the lens, this will be left set to 'On'.

That means that we won't turn the stabilisation off manually unless it's absolutely necessary to obtain a satisfactory photo. This last resort will, however, be considered a weakness and will be taken into account in the review and camera the scoring system.

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