Tech Blog

[#1]

With the F200, Fuji is stretching the molds of photography to a point you are almost tempted to think that the EXR is an abbreviation for EXtRa terrestrial with the camera’s occasional out-of-this-world performance.

↑ The Fuji F200 EXR. 12 MP, 24-140mm lens weighing in at 140 gr.

Full control, and I mean full

In the F200 Fuji basically lets you ‘play’ with the sensor at the individual pixel level.Now that’s pretty cool! With Canon, Sony, Nikon etc. you do not come anywhere close to this. All they let you do is turn up or down the light-sensitivity, i.e. crank the ISO value up or down. With the F200 you can tell the sensor if it should concentrate on “High Resolution” (HR-mode), “high Sensitivity /low Noise (SN), “Dynamic Range” (DR), or simply put it on auto and let the camera determine what the scene you are photographing calls for.

↓ The EXR menu

The high sensitivity/low noise is obtained by effectively doubling the pixel size by pairing neighboring pixels (of the same color) together increasing the camera’s light sensitivity and lowering the noise. The higher dynamic range is the result of splitting the sensor in two, one half underexposes the scene and the other half overexposes it, and then combining the two halves into one shot at the end.

In both the SN and DR mode the resolution drops from 12 to 6 MP due to the ‘hocus pocus’ performed by the sensor.

That’s all fine and dandy, but does it work?

Short answer: yes. Longer answer: still yes, but it comes at a price of added user complexity and reduced image resolution.

↓ ISO 1600 under good lighting conditions. Comparison between the Fuji F200 (top) and Nikon D700 (bottom).


 

 ↑ ISO 1600 under poor lighting. Comparison between Fuji F200 (top) and Nikon D700 (bottom).

Now that’s quite a performance from a pocket camera especially for the high sensitivity/low noise setting.

I wasn’t able to detect the same great performance in scenes shot with the dynamic range setting. Now that doesn’t mean that there isn’t a difference, it just mean that I wasn’t able to get significant results. Overall the images produced by the camera were of very, very good quality considering the small sensor size.

↓ Macro shots with the Fuji F200 (top) and Nikon D700 (bottom). A bit of an 'unfair' comparison given the major difference in sensor size.  

Fuji’s EXR sensor could well be a step in the right direction with just the right amount of outside-the-box thinking that sensor manufacturers need to have to get to continue to squeeze even better image quality from tomorrow’s digital cameras. Unfortunately, the F200 does not record RAW images. Shooting with the F200 the question of “what if it had RAW and the EXR sensor, what kind of results would that yield...?” was always in the corner of my mind. Hmm, one can only wonder.*)

 *) Note: Fuji recently announced the Finepix S200 EXR which will feature both the magic of the EXR sensor and the ability to record in RAW format.Wow!

Auto this and auto that

Normally I am not a big believer of auto-features in cameras. Just read “Hands of the auto-mode”, part 1 and part 2. But I have to admit that the Fuji F200’s auto-ISO feature is well implemented. It is possibly the best implementation I have seen of this feature in a pocket camera. Other than just setting the camera to auto-select the ISO value you can set the upper value, ranging from ISO 400, 800, 1600 and 3200. I had the camera set to auto-ISO with upper limit of 1600 basically the whole trip, and it worked really well. Only improvement I can think of is to be able set the slowest shutter speed yourself.

Again I have to admit that the EXR auto-mode also works quite well. The mode auto-selects the EXR mode (high resolution, high sensitivity or dynamic range) depending on the scene that you are shooting. Generally the camera got it right. The individual EXR-modes are in effect also auto-modes, since they each limit the settings available. E.g. when in “Dynamic Range” mode you can not engage the flash, and the only ISO values you can choose are Auto 400, 800 and 1600. Strange. In none of the EXR modes can you adjust the shutter speed and aperture. To do that you must set the camera to P-mode or M-mode.

↓ Auto ISO and high sensitivity setting in action (ISO 800)


 

↑ Dynamic range setting in action
 
Speaking of the P-mode, it’s a bit of a strange mode. Normally you can change the shutter speed and aperture in sync, but the mode doesn’t allow you to change either. Strange. You need to set the camera to M-mode (Manual) if you plan to change the shutter speed and aperture. To help guide you the camera has a basic light-meter’ scale indicating over- and underexposure. The F200 uses neutral density filters to set the aperture. Apparently, only one filter was installed resulting in you can only set the aperture to a low or high (filter off or on) value.

Even more strange is that the well-implemented auto-ISO feature is not available in M-mode. Hmm!?

To be continued in part 2

Message Edited by klausboedker on 08-05-2009 11:44 PM