Camera

[varjohaltia]

I bought one. I hope this doesn't come across as bragging, but somewhat informational instead.

Despite attempting to save for a condo/house, I did splurge $159.95 on a Fujifilm F20.

Now, the point of this post is why? Not why I bought a camera, which is pretty obvious to anyone who knows me, but why THIS camera. I'm hoping that these might be points you can consider when looking for a camera of your own in the future. I made my decision based upon my judgement; you may want to put more weight on style, size, LCD size, speed or splash-proofness, for example.

• It is reasonably priced.
  
• It has a reasonable resolution of 6.1 megapixels. That's enough (as much as my SLR!) The more pixels you cram into a sensor of the same size, the worse the quality of said pixels.
  
• Not only does it not have too many pixels, they're strewn about an unusually large sensor. As a result, it deals amazingly well with higher sensitivities -- it can take pictures in dimmer light than the competition. This is something that is currently almost impossible to measure in consumer cameras, because to combat thermal noise the cameras perform noise reduction, essentially smoothing over the picture, removing noise and detail. You're really stuck looking at sample pictures from review sites.
  
• It doesn't have a dial which puts it in "record" or "playback" mode. Those modes make me break out in irritation. SLRs have it right. You take a picture. You take another one. If you want to look at them, you press a button. While you're looking at them, you see something else you want to take a picture of. You point the camera and press the shutter release. The camera should take a picture! Mind you, a lot of people prefer a mode dial. One size doesn't fit all!
  
• It has a reasonably big LCD, at 2.5" There are 3" cameras out there, and they certainly are tempting.
  
• When I had my Fuji S2Pro, I really liked the colors and results of Fuji's image processing.
  
• It tries hard not to overpower flash pictures with the flash, but to balance flash and available light. How well this works for me remains to be seen.
  

It also has things wrong with it:

• It doesn't have an optical viewfinder. You have to use the LCD to compose. This leads to greater lag between the time you want to take the picture and the picture is taken, and shorter battery life. Having the option of turning the LCD off and still being able to shoot would be nice.
  
• The resolution of the LCD is sub-par. This means that you see a lot less detail on the only thing that allows you to compose the shot.
  
• It uses xD media. xD is horrendously slow (and therefore makes picture-to-picture waiting unnecessarily long) and rather rarely used.
  
• It doesn't have image stabilization/vibration reduction/whatever. This is where either the lens or the imaging sensor are moved to counter camera shake. There are an increasing amount of cameras out there (such as the F20) which claim to have this feature, but in reality fake it in various ways. Generally, this feature allows you to shoot pictures in circumstances that are 3 or so EV steps darker than you otherwise could. However, this particular camera does so well in low-light thanks to its increased sensitivity that the end result is pretty much a wash.
  
• It doesn't have the best of lenses, and there are optical shortcomings with it. It's not any worse than many others, but it's not best-in-class and I will notice these things.
  
• It has neither a histogram view nor highlight clipping blinking. What this means is that you can't reliably judge whether your pictures got overexposed, where bright areas are just white with no detail, or whether your pictures are being underexposed, where you lose unnecessary shadow detail. I can understand that histograms are considered fancy, but the blinking warning indicator for overexposure should be commonplace. Shame on you, Fuji. This is the one thing that may make me most annoyed with the camera.
  
• Like every compact camera under four digits, either the sensor, processing algorithms, or JPEG compression messes up things like rippling water, fur and foliage.
  
• It's last year's model. A lot of new models are announced and introduced around the PMA exhibit in early spring. On the flip side, it's not an early year model, having been announced in the summer, so it's half a generation ahead the F30, for example. Sensors, focus accuracy, and image processing improve every year. They don't improve that horribly much, though.
  
• There isn't a nice underwater housing for it yet. I entertained the idea of one of the splash-proof Olympus cameras for kayaking, but I know I will use this thing indoors a lot.
  
• It's a traditional design, where the lens has to extend from the body of the camera. This means it takes it longer to turn on, and doing things such as underwater housings is a bit tougher. It's also more things to break, get dusty, and makes the lens somewhat more difficult to clean. The other kind, folded optics, where all moving parts of the lens essentially do their thing inside the camera appeals to me. (To achieve this, they have a mirror or prism with its own issues.)
  
• It has very little manual control.
  
• The tripod mount is in the wrong place. This is also very common in modern compact cameras. It matters if you're doing multi-image panoramas on a tripod; you always want the tripod mount to be centered under the imaging element.
  
• It's not tiny, and it's a box. It's not shiny and stylish like the current Casio and Canon models (my design favorites.)
  

Comments

[sakurakurakura.livejournal.com]

YOU GO GIRL.

Or, Toivo, rather.

[varjohaltia.livejournal.com]

D'awww! Thank you, Liz, that's too sweet!