F300EXR – Review Part 5 – Shoot the Moon

I got the grab today to shoot the moon and Jupiter with the F300EXR to see how the extra reach would behave. As a refresher, this is what I was able to get from the F70EXR:

5mp

I like that one, quite a bit. Here is the 10mp equivalent:

Also very nice.

The F70EXR had no trouble focusing on the moon. I suppose that this is simply because contrast detect focus is extremely reliable, if very slow.

The F300EXR, on the other hand, gave me absolute fits! I could not get a focused image in center focus no matter what I tried. I thought I was totally stuck and then I thought maybe multi could find the subject, and it did. So I did get a ocuple of shots, although I don;t like the 5mp one … I forgot the cardinal rule … the air changes moment by moment so you shoot lots of images.

Anyway, here they are:

6mp

Focus is obviously slightly off here. That new hybrid focus system does not always make the right choice, which is typical of Fuji automation. Their EXR AUTO mode makes bad choices quite often as well (my opinion of course.)

12mp

Click through to see the bigger version. This one is not bad at all.  I like it as well as the better of the F70 shots and the moon comes out a bit larger since we have 90mm more reach. I’ll try to work out the focus issues as I go along, but suffice it to say that simple contrast detect appears to be a bit more reliable so far.

I rendered the 12mp version in B&W because there was fringing that was hard to remove. As with the others in this family, the fringing is much more apparent in L size.

And finally, the L sized version is the better of the two, but only because we got good focus and good air on this shot. The smooth parts of the moon seem too smooth to me. A bit more NR than I would like.