This is to announce urbi et orbi that I have decided to reward myself for nothing in particular and bought another Cool Gadget I Don't Really Need (TM), a Sony DSC-F828 digital camera.

I am very far from being serious photographer (I was a bit more twenty or so years ago), and any of the current crop of cheap pocketable 3Mpixel 3x zoom jobs would be more than adequate, but F828's sheer gadgetary coolness and the fact that tilting lense design agrees very much with my semifunctional right arm (right biceps not working from birth - destroyed nerve) conspired to make me spend two or three times more on this beauty.

I started to enumerate good and not so good points of the camera, but then I reread similar list on DPReview and found out I agree almost completely with that Phil guy. I got exactly what I expected.

As an example of chromatic aberration (or 'purple fringing') see this photo of one of my overburdened bookshelves (85kB JPEG, downsampled from full 3264x2448 TIFF) and this full-res detail. As you can see, CA is visible on any high-contrast border (at full res, anyway).

Does anyone have any experience with CA-removing filters in Photoshop or similar tools (Phil implies such things exist)?

Another question: the camera produces very decent VGA res 30fps movie clips, but they are in mpeg-1 (I think) and consume around 1.5MB per second. Is there a tool (preferably free) to recode that into something more compact?

All in all, very nice toy. Now, all I need is some practice to polish my rusty photo skills and time to throw an album or two to the web.

Don't know about Photoshop, but try VirtualDub for converting video files. The de-facto codec standards these days seem to be DivX and XviD.

You could take a look at Shay Stephens' Chromatic Aberrations plugin for photosop. It cost 10$, but a lot of good has been said on it on the STF (Sony Talk Forum). It's a good place to talk discuss such issue. I learned a lot there when I bought my 707.

[Edited the link to Photoshop or Paint shop pro plugin instead of photoshop only version]