So we know by now that the F70EXR stomps the F80EXR in terrible light. But what about a simple shot at 1600 ISO in adequate light? Light that we don’t plan to heavily adjust via custom white balance?
Well, the results are in and are not bad at all.
![f80_f70_macro_compare[1]](http://letkeman.net/Photos/albums/F80EXRTests/f80_f70_macro_compare.jpg "f80_f70_macro_compare[1]")
Of course, I upsized the F70EXR to match sizes (6mp.)
Please ensure that you click through to the large version of the image. I have two shots here, both hand held at 1600 ISO. The first is of my keyboard, focused on the M. The crops are the M itself and the top right hand area showing the bokeh and noise. Nothing to speak of there … both cams did fine. The F80 even shows a bit more detail, but that’s because I focused a bit closer. Don’t read anything more into it than that.
The second pair of crops come from an image of my mouse. Here, there is an obvious difference in detail retention. The F70EXR retains quite a bit more. This is clearly because the extra pixels have required more NR to deal with noise, and the almost-smooth surface of the mouse took a beating. Classic issue that exists in all small sensor cams … the F70EXR being one of the least effected I have seen.
So … you can certainly shoot the F80EXR at 1600 ISO if the white balance is not too far off. You will lose a wee bit of detail, but these are 100% crops and the results are not too bad.
The bottom line is that we now know that the cam has one serious achilles heel … pushing the blue channel. That’s simply fatal.
Makes me wonder if Fuji screwed something up in the firmware for this camera? That’s simply too big a difference for a fairly small change in pixel density.
What about it Fuji? Care to check your white balance algorithm in the F80EXR and release a firmware update if you can do better?
6 comments:
Kim ACR is Adobe Camera RAW software?
Archish: That is correct. You get ACR with CD4 and with Elements 8.
Kim a quick question although not related to this post. I found that you had posted Neat Image profiles for F70 long back and you are using ACR now. Is there any huge/great difference in Noise Reduction with ACR compared to NI? I found NI be decent enough in removing the noise without much loss in detail.
Archish: I find that I use NI when I push images pretty hard ... typically shooting the D700 around 12800 iso or something like that ... I sometimes prefer the look of Topaz Denoise as well ... but for most images, I just use the NR sliders in ACR. The F70 is particularly easy to deal with because it has so little nasty noise. The F80 will be like that in good light, but not so pleasant to work with in bad light.
Kim,
How were the images in the previous high ISO test (bad light) processed? Was the custom WB set in-camera or later in PP? I've noticed that many cameras screw up the blue channel in yellow light with custom WB. But if you shoot on Auto WB and later PP to correct the color the result is better.
Regards,
Valentin
val: I believe that I performed it both ways, but that's a very good point. I'll perform a test comparing specifically the in-cam custom WB against ACR WB. Thanks for the idea.
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