Is the F200EXR that much better than the F31fd?

Today, the Fuji Talk Forum on DPReview is a buzz with interest in this review. It's been pointed to before, but it seems that there might be some new comparisons on there. Specifically, the F200EXR is directly compared to the F31fd.

Why does this matter? Because there is a cult of people who believe that the F31fd was the culminations of Fujifilm's great Fxx series of cameras, the low-light masterpieces that were able to shoot decent small prints at 1600iso ... a first for a compact camera.

Personally, I like the F11 just fine ... it used a softer touch on the noise reduction and sharpening, and could therefore handle quite a bit of processing. I compare that camera to the Canon G10 (my new favorite) in this blog entry.

The buzz is made up of a lot of superlatives. The F200EXR is "a hundred times better" ... "VASTLY better" ... and so on ...

I compared the F200EXR to itself at 1600ISO previously in this blog entry ... and found that the new 6mp "binning" mode seems to work. You get a better result than with the 12mp mode, which means that this camera should get back the high ISO performance that was lost when jumping to 12mp. A bit ironic, though, that it was achieved by dropping back to 6mp in this "special" mode :-)

The real benefit though, is that this camera increases the effective pixel size while taking advantage of the really nice lens from the F100fd. This lens shows less tendency to CA and PF, and it seems sharper corner to corner than the F31fd's lens ever was.

So there should be an improvement, and indeed there is obvious improvement at 100%. That is, you can see less smearing from noise reduction and you can see less blur from the lens. You also see much less CA and PF.

But what does this mean to j6p? Remember that the average person does not print and tends these days to post to facebook or equivalent.

Once downsized, a lot of these differences simply disappear. And for those enthusiasts who process their images (I don't see any point in just taking what the camera gives you), the differences becomes very marginal.

Here is a pair of 800 ISO images (the highest useful ISO on almost any small sensor camera) where I downsized for the web after performing essentially identical processing. Basically, for each image, I:

• Loaded into CS4 directly as a copy / paste
  
• Removed distortions using PTLens
• Adjusted saturation and vibrancy (it was terrible on both cams)
• Adjusted contrast, opening the shadows a bit
• Adjusted local contrast with the DSLR Tools clarify filter
• Added more local contrast to the subject (middle forground) using PKSharpener's narrow edge local contrast filter. Also worked over the background branches and foliage on both images.
  
• Resized to 800px

I performed one special step to each of the images:

• For the F200EXR, I ran Neat Image 6 to slightly reduce the obvious grain. I added luminance sharpening to preserve detail. The end result was still more grainy than the F31fd.
  
• For the F31fd, I added a slight amount of output sharpening to equalize to that received by the 200 in its Neat Image step. Both images appear to me to have the same amount of sharpening now.

Now remember, I used the same amounts in each of the steps ... the two images were similar enough that no variance was needed to achieve the same effect.

So ... drum roll please. Which is which? In my opinion ... all these superlatives get washed away once properly processed.

Remember ... click to get the 800px version, and use the back button to come back.