On my last attempt to figure out what the F80EXR was doing in poor light, I got a comment from “val” that suggested that I test custom white balance against auto white balance to see if the camera is simply really bad at pushing the blue channel.
So I ran this test: shoot each cam at M4:3, 1600 ISO, P mode DR400 and EXR SN mode.
The results:
![f80_f70_wb_test_1600_iso[1]](http://letkeman.net/Photos/albums/F80EXRTests/f80_f70_wb_test_1600_iso.jpg "f80_f70_wb_test_1600_iso[1]")
Again, please click through the above image to the larger one.
What we see is that the AWB versions from the F80 have a lot of yellow blotching. The custom WB (CWB) versions have transformed that to blue and yellow blotching.
Also , the details between the letters of “BAN” are poorly defined in the F80 images, while they are quite accurate in the F70 images.
The F70 images are more subtle, with much less blue channel contribution in the CWB versions and and less saturation overall. This contributes to a much more pleasant noise signature.
I still think Fuji screwed up their CWB algorithms … both cams are attempting to neautralize the image according to my CWB setting (on the same spot.) So both should be fairly similar, yet they are not. Fuji did not need to screw with that setting at all, yet they have.
Again, the F70EXR will wipe the floor with the F80EXR in bad light. AWB or CWB … doesn’t much matter.
Fuji … how about a firmware patch to put back the F70EXR WB algorithms. They are excellent.
