Fujifilm S1 – Review Part 8 – Trying the monopod for yet more critical sharpness …

Lots of images here: http://letkeman.net/Gallery/miscimages/Fuji-S1-and-HS50EXR-Review-Images

I went out with a monopod and the S1 to see how much higher my critical sharpness rate could get. And I was kind of blown away …

Right out of the gate I was getting images with smooth backgrounds and a kind of clarity that you only get when everything is just right. The light was gorgeous here and the image takes on a certain dimensionality that is easy to see and hard to explain … I get a visceral reaction …

And again …

Even 640 ISO cannot really spoil the party …

For this next shot, I loosened the wing nut on the Manfrotto swivel head and tilted the camera upward, catching the jet just after it went overhead. Once I added some contrast and processed the sky I found the image looked wonderful. And this one is far from critically sharp … but sometimes we don’

Here’s one where the critical sharpness is on the flower, just missing the bee. But I don’t care, the shot is very nice anyway in my opinion.

Here’s a crop of one of the shots … in fact, it is enlarged past 100% so the noise is accentuated. You can see that this is not large sensor worthy, but it is certainly clear enough with good color …

Another image that took my breath away … (yes, I might be easily impressed. )

A bit closer …

That’s enough clarity for me from a tiny sensor …

The back yard always has willing subjects …

Here’s a severe close up of another image in the gallery …

I sat around shooting these random subjects with the monopod and must admit to feeling really good about how well the camera performed. But the best was yet to come.

Nick came outside and sat for a while and did not complain when I turned the camera on him for a while … probably seething inside of course …

This image is pretty amazing for clarity, tone, color … it easily competes with images I have shot with large sensors …

And another …

Go in really close … again beyond 100% …

If you complain about that image quality then you are just being picky

I leave you with this image … I have learned that steadying the camera also allows the AF to pick out small details. So bracing makes sense for many reasons …

Lots of images here: http://letkeman.net/Gallery/miscimages/Fuji-S1-and-HS50EXR-Review-Images

Fujifilm S1 – Review Part 7 – Remembering to brace in the search for critical sharpness …

Up to this point, I have been having difficulty getting more than a few decent shots in a session. So I went out for a walk with the explicit intent to brace the camera tightly for every shot. Elbows tucked in, a bit of tension in the wrists and the eye pressed firmly to the EVF. Gentle squeeze of the shutter and a pause in breathing.

All in all, I think I did well … the S1 turns out to be a pretty good walkabout camera …

I shot a scene against the sky to see how sharp the leaves can look at max zoom … I am pleased with this.

Here is a very tight crop that shows real potential. This is not a perfect shot by any stretch, but it has a lot of appeal for me so I can live with its slightly blown out back, fairly strong grain, and slight lack of critical sharpness.

This next image is the one that got me thinking that I can get sharp images from this camera.

I could see the clarity in the EVF. And then I shot this next one and was really energized.

Wow … that one really worked. Now I know that steadiness really helps.

Another where the sharpness was palpable in the EVF …

And again … with the bees I go on a roll …

 

That last one is the prize of the shoot … the but tongue is amazing …

But here is the winner …

And again, there are more where these came from … http://letkeman.net/Gallery/miscimages/Fuji-S1-and-HS50EXR-Review-Images

So I am not all that worried about carrying the S1 hand held this weekend. I have managed some really sharp and clear images from it … these last ones remind me of the joy I felt in the first set of bees I captured with the J1 and the 70-300VR, which shot at 800mm … there is just something about long zooms when you steady them just right.

Fujifilm S1 versus HS50EXR – Review Part 6 – The woodpecker …

I took a brief walk at lunch today and perhaps 50 feet from my house I encountered a woodpecker destroying a dying tree. I was very impressed with his industrious hunt for food. And I had the two cameras so I shot a bazillion images. The woodpecker was inside the branches so there was dappled sunlight, but the image was backlit so I had to increase compensation by about a stop.

All in all, these were bad choices. It slowed the shutter and that added blur. All in all, the images sucked rather a lot.

Also, craning your neck upward is not conducive to sharp images. More blur on top of the slow shutter. I enjoyed shooting these few that survived, but processing them was a nightmare. Grain, blur, CA (for the S1) and I ended up deleting a lot of images …

Sigh …

I did get a decent image from the S1 right up front … and by decent I mean you can see a bit of detail and the pose is ok.

Here’s another from the S1 … it too shows some detail and the pose is decent. The background is not great, but what can you do? You shoot what is there …

The lone surviving HS50EXR image is pretty good too. But only at web size. You won’t see the originals for these as even these few suck.

But hey, I got to watch a woodpecker for quite a while and it was fun … that’s why we do this, no?

Fujifilm S1 versus HS50EXR – Review Part 5 – Two walks in the neighbourhood … and one brain fart …

Cloudy with the threat of rain. I was on a technical conference call pretty much all morning on Thursday, so I grabbed the cameras and took a wander around the neighborhood for a few minutes once I had a moment for lunch. When I got back, I quickly dumped the cards – and deleted all but two images.

For part 1 I had been shooting at 3200 ISO at the end and I left both cameras on that setting … a royal brain fart. I ended up saving one shot from each camera …

The S1 shot a nice flower that came out reasonably sharp and with only moderate noise, considering the circumstances.

The HS50EXR shot a squirrel in a great pose, and although it is really noisy I am willing to live with it for the purposes of web presentation. On some monitors, this image looks absolutely abysmal. So be it … it’s still a great pose.

So let that be a lesson … check your camera’s settings before you embark on a photographic journey of any length.

---

And now we begin part 2 of the review, which is a simple walk in the neighborhood with head to head shots of whatever appeared before me …

Note that clicking on the following images will give you full sized JPEGs as rendered in Lightroom 5.6. This review does that just to get you to understand how difficult it is to get anything sharp at all when one is plinking about without really concentrating on good technique. I really paid for it …

This first group includes several images each. I love daisies in any form, and the yellow daisies with skinny leaves is one of my favorites.

S1 – This one is actually pretty sharp.

 

HS50EXR – this too is quite sharp.

So the two are quite capable of shooting web images. If you click on them (and you may need to open in a window or tab or whatever and then expand) you will see that they are not really critically sharp. But at web sizes they are very nice.

Note that there are similar images in the gallery page for this review, so you can look there for more examples. http://letkeman.net/Gallery/miscimages/Fuji-S1-and-HS50EXR-Review-Images

I love Purple Coneflowers, and these are growing in my neighbor’s yard. I like these images, but they are not critically sharp. Still, at web sizes they look great.

HS50EXR

S1

So far the tonality and colors are pretty similar to me. Also, the sharpness is very similar.

Wandering along, I encounter a squirrel …

The HS50EXR really made a hash of this one … but some of that was me (little bracing) and most of it was a tiny sensor at 1600 ISO … such is life when you shoot on cloudy days under trees …

The S1 does not make me shout for joy either … but it did choose ISO 400 at the cost of shutter speed. This was probably the right choice …

So far I would say that we are in a tie.

There are a number of other comparison images in the gallery, so pop over there for that. I will leave you with one more comparison where I think the S1 spanked the HS50EXR a bit … these are close crops of a basketball net that I shot from perhaps 25 feet …

Note that the difference here is not the lens, but rather the statistical nature of OIS at such long focal lengths …

HS50EXR

S1

There is quite a difference in micro-contrast in the ropes. I have noticed this difference in several other images, always favoring the S1. So when you get it right, the S1 does a very nice job.

Fujifilm S1 versus HS50EXR – Review Part 4 – Chromatic Aberration …

The HS50EXR has virtually no chromatic aberration, but as I have been processing the S1 I have noticed a rather breathtaking amount of both CA and purple fringing. I am usually able to get rid of it with a heavy hand on the controls in Lightroom, but it does leave a mark for sure. Removing CA is never free, and removing PF really stains the edges.

I cropped the test charts from part 3 to show how easily the lens fringes. This chart was shot in a dark corner of the basement with a long exposure on tripod. Yet there is still rather a lot of CA …

The HS50EXR shows none at all …

But the S1 shows more than a little …

Looking at a few screen shots in Lightroom, one can see that overexposing images is a huge risk …

Watch your exposures and be prepared to deal with it. Although I must say that for people who are not hyper sensitive to it, you won’t see enough to freak out over. The early EXR lenses were just as bad at times and we dealt with them. So was the S100fs and we dealt with that too.

Fujifilm S1 versus HS50EXR – Review Part 3 – Magnification comparison at max zoom over 10 feet …

I have noticed that the S1 does not magnify more than the HS50EXR, despite the 1200mm advantage over the 1000mm claimed by the HS50EXR.

So I set up a tripod and shot a test chart about 10 feet away.

HS50EXR

S1

Not only is the S1 not 20% longer, it is clear quite a bit shorter at max zoom.

Hmmm … could this be that internal focus issue that so many super zooms suffer from in APS-C land?

Perhaps … I will have to test them at very long distances later on …

Fujifilm S1 – Review Part 2 – More impressions and the manual … also a funky continuous shooting issue …

The manual can be found here: http://www.fujifilm.com/support/digital_cameras/manuals/pdf/index/s/finepix_s1_manual_en.pdf

Now, I need the manual because I was out at lunch for a brief walk about and encountered a beautiful woodpecker busily eating whatever it could hammer out of a dying tree. All this about 50 feet from my house.

What I wanted was to set both to continuous shooting so I could maximize the likelihood of a few sharp images. There are two buttons between the shutter and the mode dial on both cameras. The left hand button is for compensation, and this works well on both. The right hand button is for continuous mode and is very handy on the HS50EXR, because it works as expected.

The button on the S1 is dead. I have no idea why. Is the camera Fuji sent broken? Or is this a setting? There is nothing obvious in the menus, so I am left to hunt it down in the manual. Sigh …

---

Much later …

Ok, I reset the camera. It worked. Then I set up the camera the way I like it again and it stopped working. I set quality back to jpeg and it worked again. So it does not shoot continuous in raw mode at all. Wow … the HS50EXR has no such limitations.

---

So, some other impressions of the S1 …

Not impressed by the issue with continuous shooting. I fail to see why it should be a JPEG only camera for features like that.

The EVF is claustrophobically small … but it is very clear. Win some, lose some. HS50EXR’s EVF is much bigger, but it is not nearly as clear and contrasty.

Setting the diopter on the EVF is easy on the HS50EXR. Zoom in, dial what you want, no sweat. On the S1 it is very unpleasant. I was never able to get it right by setting it while zoomed in. It just would not find a sharp position. Zooming out to full wide makes it easier and thankfully the sharpness of the view remains when zoomed in.

The lack of an EVF sensor is a real drag. In the end, I like to use the EVF and I like to chimp images. Chimping in the tiny EVF is painful, although I am getting used to it. When I want to see it larger, I click the play button and it does come up on the LCD. But not that quickly. The HS50EXR behaves correctly.

The view in the EVF moves around a great deal unless you brace the camera very carefully. This makes it really difficult to shoot anything that moves. Both cameras have this problem, although the heavier HS50EXR is easier to stabilize hand held.

Without extreme care, critical sharpness never happens. That’s right … never. There is no way on God’s green earth that you can shoot in snapshot style with 1000mm effective focal length and get something sharp. Not gonna happen. I have shot many hundred images so far with these two and my keeper count is well under 50%. My critical sharpness count was zero for the first 200 or so. That is not a misprint or hyperbole …

Once I started bracing … and when I tried a monopod on the S1, my keeper rate jumped a bit and my critical sharpness rate jumped a lot. Quite a few of the images were extremely clear and sharp. These cameras require very careful handling.

Are the Weather Gods Following Some Sort of Script?

Five of the next fourteen days are holidays. And every one of them shows rain in Nepean, ON, while every work day is looking sunny.

WTF …

Fujifilm S1 versus HS50EXR – Review Part 1 – The Arrival and First Shots and First Impressions

Whew … what a long-winded title. Sorry about that, and now I am committed to using it for however many parts of this review I can get done in about 3 weeks.

Anyway, they arrived today and I was a bit stunned when I opened the door to Purolator and found the man standing over these …

Wow …

Note the European plug … not sure what that’s about, but I had a Samsonite adapter to North American plugs lying around so no problem getting the camera charged. I could, of course, have used any other USB brick as well.

The HS50EXR was a bit of a mess, showing its age perhaps. Yet both cameras had the original neck strap still in the plastic. I took the liberty of putting the neck strap on of course since there is no way I want either falling to the ground due to lack of proper support.

---

The Fujifilm S1 is a weather sealed bridge camera with a spectacular reach out to 12mm equivalent and a fairly light and small form factor. It seems like a rather nice bit of kit and I must say that it seems to perform rather well for a 1/2.3” sensor.

The HS50EXR is of course the flagship and final entry in Fuji’s line of EXR based super zooms and is known for rather sharp results if you know what you are doing. But I suspect that this is going to be a very tough battle, because there are quite a few standard bayer superzooms and they are no slouches in the image quality battle in good light.

I plan to test these in all sorts of light, so I hope that we can answer the question that has been appearing more and more often lately in the Fujifilm Talk Forum at http://dpreview.,com … that being “Which of these two should I get?”

And by answer the question, I really mean provide sufficient insight and data for people to make up their own minds as to which one seems more suitable for their shooting style and their taste for ergonomics.

---

First Impressions

Well, technically this is my second impression of the HS50EXR since I have already had a go around last year when Fuji sent me this camera and the F900EXR. Those reviews can be perused at this link.

But it is definitely my first impression of the S1 and so far my impression is pretty favorable.

It’s tough to decide how to give my first impressions, by camera or head to head, but in the interests of my time and energy I will do it head to head for this first pass.

What do I like better about the S1?

• Compact body
• Smooth zoom
• Closer focus at max zoom, higher magnification, more reach
• Shoots at 6400, and is almost equal to the HS50EXR at 3200
• OIS seems more reliable
• AF seems faster and more sure
• Menus have been trimmed

What do I like better about the HS50EXR?

• Grip is angled better and proportioned better
• Shutter is slightly angled, which feels a bit better to me
• Comes with a charger (S1 only comes with a cable)
• EVF is larger and clearer
• EVF switching works better by quite a bit
• Separate door for SD card which is not impeded by tripod
• AF ring actually turns :-)
• EXR dynamic range extension is available, but we’ll see how much that matters in practice

So yes, things are getting interesting. But none of these issues is dominant or fatal … they just are …

---

First shots. These are shot in my basement by the light of a compact fluorescent bulb. The exposures are brutal for tiny sensors … the S1 shooting the face of the gauges at 1/17s and f/5.6 at 6400 ISO. The HS50EXR cannot shoot raw at 6400 ISO so I got 1/8s at f/5.6 and 3200 ISO. And both came out reasonably sharp, indicating that the two of them have pretty decent OIS. Of course, I used the EVF to brace against my eye. As I was writing this, I realized how unfair this is to the S1, so I went back and shot them at 3200 as well.

These are not intended to be definitive … I just snapped them and thought I’d show them.

The HS50EXR looks ok at 3200 ISO, but the magnification is disappointing at max zoom. I had to roll the chair back to something like 7 feet or more.

The next one is in macro mode, which makes no difference at all at max zoom. Same focus distance limitation.

The S1 does as well or even better in my opinion, and the magnification is magnificent …

And in macro mode it actually manages to get almost a foot closer I found …

 

And how about 6400 ISO?

Can’t say I’m disappointed. This little sensor is pretty decent.

Bonus round: 6400 versus 3200 … ad hoc test just worked out that way …

S1 at 6400:

HS50EXR at 3200:

 

I can’t say that the S1 got spanked … because it didn’t …

Hmmm ….

More to come …