Hello CodeMonkey

To me, the differences appear to remarkable for being simple JPEG artefacts. Compare the two figures below:



and



The first one is taken with zoom factor 1x but exploded 3x at the computer. The second one has been taken with zoom factor 3x. The only other difference between both images is a slightly different ISO value applied (114 for the 1x zoom versus 123 for the 3x zoom image). The camera-zoomed image shows much more detail, for example in the blue upper left area (recognizable in the full size image only) and in the yellow/brown area in the lower center. The increase in detail does not look like just a result of a lower jpeg compression. (The images uploaded are png, in order to avoid any additional compression.)

My guess: The sensor has about 10 MPixel instead of the official 5 MPixel. Hence, when the image is cropped to about 1/3 of the original size, the number of available pixels is not reduced to about 1.6 MPixel but about 3 MPixels (which then are exploded to 5 MPixel to have the same size as an image with zoom 1x).