The Venus III engine is widely known for its tendency to apply heavyhanded noise reduction. Less commonly discussed are the positive aspects of the Panasonic in-camera processor. It is widely appreciated that in-camera processing addresses many ills, amongst them softness, low contrast, and purple fringing. As a RAW shooter, I sometimes wonder what else is being accomplished with the in-camera JPEG that I must try to match by hand. I look forward to the day that my RAW processors of choice can automatically match the in-camera processing as a starting point for further developing. So what exactly is the state of the art for in-camera processing?

The Panasonic DMC-FZ18 represents quite a feat. It is relatively compact and features an 18x zoom starting at the 28mm FOV equivalent in 35mm photography terms. Despite this massive zoom range, the JPEG results are remarkably free of distortion, free of purple fringing, and show impressive corner sharpness. Quite a feat of optics from Leica, no? Well, it turns out that the credit for much of this apparently optical achievement goes in fact to the often maligned Venus III engine. A DPR user named Dcuk has stumbled upon the fact that the in-camera processing not only addresses barrel distortion but chops off a bit of those nasty corners in the process! See the thread here for details, examples, and discussion. This really shouldn't surprise me. After all, I often correct distortion in post-processing, and anything we can do in post is achievable in-camera. Still, I found Dcuk's discovery very interesting, particularly from the standpoint of a RAW shooter missing out on that Venus III goodness. If you find these in-camera adjustments distasteful, consider the fact that while the human eye couples a mediocre lens to a good sensor (retina), it's the processor (brain) that makes for great imaging in the case of human vision.