I've posted this a couple of times and each time it's been marked assumed answered, but it's not been properly addressed. I've now done some tests and want to show the evidence for the problem.
The issue occurs when videoing and zooming in to a distant object. There is a lot of bluriness and this is not entirely due to the limitations of digital zoom. What I've noticed is that, in preview mode, when the image is zoomed in, and then the image stabilizer control is toggled, the image jumps into focus. Then zoom out and back in again and it's blurry! Toggle autofocus and it's back in focus. It doesn't seem to matter whether image stablization is on or off - just that it is switched from one state to the other. The three images below show the effect. The first one is the scene fully zoomed out. Then zoom in and the middle image shows the scene - it's blurry. Then toggle and see the difference in the bottom image - leaf texture is so much clearer and the edges are better defined. Convinced there is a software bug now?
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Interesting - you may be right but I'm not sure. Certainly the focus of the vertical post (which is around 5m in front of the green hedge) does not look very different between the two images which supports your theory. But it could be that the camera was trying to focus on the hedge so the post would be blurry in either case. I had a go at sharpening the blurry image with desktop image processing software to see if I could replicate the detail in the improved image, to establish whether this is artifical sharpening, or truly optically improved. Results below: the bottom image is the first blurry image which I artificially sharpened with raised contrast, and although it's not totally conclusive, I think there is more detail in the middle image which suggests that the optical focus was different (ie better). But I wouldn't stake my life on it. Either way, I agree - it's a bug - makes the video camera fairly useless except for wide angle scenes, and SE need to fix it.
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