F300EXR – Review Part 13 – Swapped for a new cam …

Well, you knew it had to come … lucky part 13. And in this part, we see the first images from the new camera. I went to Henrys and did my best to find a better copy. I checked two cams and the second was much, much better than the others. So … here we are …

Interestingly, this cam still has plenty of CA in the corners and is somewhat soft at 24mm. But then, this is a real torture test and even my F80 does not fair well … and it has lovely corners in practice.

I have not shown this before, but my setup for these tests relies on an old, junky tripod that I can lean against the window sill and stabelize by extending the back leg further than the others. This works surprisingly well, although it does move quite a bit when I am handling the camera to change settings.

So let’s see the crops. Here are the crops as shot on the left side, and defringed on the right. This process takes me only seconds, so it is not onerous when it shows up. But it would be nice of Fuji could make a perfect lens one of these days :-)

Those of you who hate these long zoom EXR cameras are not going to change your minds :-) But believe it or not, I consider these results in this torture test to be acceptable at 24mm. The center is fantastic, and the slight blur and fairly strong CA is only visible in the deep corners … the rest of the image is far better than on my first copy, where only the center of the image was protected from blur and CA …

But I cannot actually say for sure that this is acceptable until I blog my trip into the woods with this camera. Look for that shortly.

The two images look like this processed:

As shot:

This test makes blur and CA blindingly obvious … and it really is obvious in this shot. But … it is again isolated to the deep corners, so I hold out hope that it will not heavily damage my images at this focal length. We shall see …

Here is the defringed version …

That’s getting pretty close … the blur is still there but is *much* less obtrusive once the CA has been removed. This image is acceptable to me … we’ll see how it fares in real life …