F70EXR -- day time faceoff with F11, G10

Still liking the cam ... but it showed me another strange weakness today. A real glitch in the metering system. I must admit that I had been looking in the menus for the compensation control and could not find it, today I realized that it is on the top position on the ring control. And I had left it on +1/3ev for who knows how long ...

Anyway ... I stopped on the back from lunch to whip off a few images to compare the day time performance of these three and the F70EXR suffered a bit for the comparison.

First, when setting + or - compensation in an EXR mode, the camera actually gives a hot exposure. But when setting 0 compensation in 800% mode, it works much better. Examples ...

The hot exposure:


Way too hot ... and you get that with both +1/3 and -1/3 compensation. I was able to save it in ACR, but dang ...


I discovered this later in photoshop when I found this image, similar metering and shot at +/-0ev ... the only one ...


Straight from the cam, that's a far better image.

The G10 does it perfectly ...


And so does the F11 ...


Shows that simple and straightforward still works ... and works really well ...

The overexposure gave me fits for other images too ...

Here's a shot of the power line. The F70EXR gave me a strange gradient in the sky, although the actual tower looks pretty nice ...


The F11 struggled to give me the whole thing, as it is the cam without 28mm ...


But the sky is better ... as it is in this shot from the G10.


So one has to be fairly careful when shooting the F70EXR in the special 800% DR priority mode ... it seems to be easy to provoke it to over expose and wreck the skies a bit ...

The final comparison shows just how much reach this cam has, and it looks pretty nice here ...


The F11 has the perfect amount of zoom to frame the shot ...


And the G10 a bit more but still works in portrait ...


Remember to click on the images to see the much crisper 800px versions.

So for landscapes, the cam can be finicky ... I suppose I'll have to test it again with mode settings. The 800% DR setting is certainly finicky and the meter is twitchy, to say the least. In fact, I believe that it is more accurate to say that it is broken. That's what comes from building in massive tables of feature interactions (three full pages in the manual) ... you just cannot predict the behavior when someone sets one you did not think about ...

Shame on you Fuji ... just make it work ...