High Zoom? Shoot the moon

A great test of a high zoom/telephoto is to take a shot or two of the moon.

I do this a lot on my Nikon D90, manual mode, ISO Lo1, Shutter around 1/160, Aperture F/11 with my crappy 300mm tamiya lens. Of course these will change with different camera bodies/lenses but its a good base to work with. A good tripod is a necessity.

Because its only 300mm, I have to crop the photo down from 12mp to around 1024x768, then its framed nicely.

But I didn't catch whether this camera had a manual settings mode or not.

The test is whether the camera can discern the craters sharply on a well crescented or gibbous moon. Its a good test of the sharpness achievable in the middle of the shot and so is the peak sharpness obtainable. I found it also shows up badly compressed JPGs more than a daytime scenery shot.

Perhaps in future (or in an addendum) you could publish shots of the moon on high-zoom review cameras?

Nah.

The amount artifacts and noise just makes the picture looks like it's from a cheap CCTV camera.