F300EXR – Review Part 6 – Macro Field of View

The F70EXR and F80EXR do not get all that close for macro shots. Close enough for flowers of course, but magnification remains fairly light. So how does the new 24mm lens do against the 27mm lens? And how about at full zoom, where we benefit from an extra 90mm?

I ran two separate tests in low light on tripod.

Test 1 – Closest Focus at Full Wide

Here, the F300EXR managed a lot more magnification. This presumably due to the ease of focusing a wider lens closer to the subject. Here is the F300EXR’s field of view shown as shot from closest focus.

And here is the shot from the F70EXR (which is identical to the one from the F80EXR in field of view, hence only one is shown.)

The plane of focus slashes left to right through the middle of the “B” so parts of these images (e.g. top right and bottom left) are out of focus. This is more pronounced with the F300EXR because of the much higher magnification.

Remember to click through to see the 800px versions. And here come the crops for this series … three from each cam, one in M4:3 and one in L4:3.

So what we see here is that all three cameras provide nice clear macro images. Good acuity across the plane of focus and some pretty decent fine details.

Even the L4:3 images look good. Why is that you might ask? Well, these are fairly extreme close ups and the threads here are multi-colored, so we benefit from higher contrast than single colored thread, and higher magnification that keeps the details large enough to escape the selective noise reduction algorithms. Close macro is the one area where I might feel safe to shoot in L4:3.

Now … moving on to the second test. I shot full tele (270mm on the F70 and F80 and 360mm on the F300) as close as I could get the tripod. This involved a lot of slight shifts of the tripod, but was ultimately successful.

The F70EXR was shot from a fairly close distance … around 3 feet. I shot the F80EXR without moving the tripod, as they have the same lens. I then mounted the F300EXR and started shifting backwards until I could lock focus. This was frustrating because I ended up shifting the tripod dozens of times. I did not expect to have to shoot at about 4 feet, but that’s how it works. Still, I did get higher magnification evenafter shifting the tripod back so far.

Here is the shot from the F300EXR. I chose the L4:3 image to display in order to show why I dislike DR100 for indoor shooting. Remember that L4:3 forces DR to stay at or under ISO, which means that shifting to L4:3 at 100ISO drops DR to 100 as well. And guess what? This blows highlights indoors. It also darkens shadows. But for some reason, the F300EXR shot is worse than the F70EXR shot, despite using the same settings – ISO 100 and DR 100.

F300EXR

And now the F70EXR

These shots use the same settings, although again the exposure of the F300EXR is slightly higher. Perhaps 1/5 stops. But that should raise both the highlights *and* the shadows. Yet the F300EXR shadows are darker here than the F70EXR.

So … I think the default standard (Provia) tone curve of the F300EXR has in fact been made steeper, which deepens shadows and brightens highlights. Exactly what I do not want.

And now the crops:

I think it is obvious from these that all three cameras provide excellent images at full zoom macro. I do slightly prefer the look of the M4:3 images as they come across as crisper slightly. Better edges I think. There has been speculation that the anti-aliasing filter is stronger than needed for 12mp mode because it must handle the larger pixels in 6mp mode when binned. This makes some sense and would explain the hint of blur that always remains in high res images from EXR cameras.

Anyway, there is some more magnification evident, which means that you win on both ends of the macro range … much more close macro and slightly more far macro. Very nice!

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.

D700 versus D300 ISO Ladder

WIth the new D7000 coming along with 16mp and people hallucinating that it looks as good as the D700, I thought it time to try a comparison of my two cams. They have the same generation of CMOS sensor, one APS-C and one full frame. Both are at 12mp. This predicts that the image quality as determined by noise should remain between 1 and 2 stops higher as we get into the higher ISOs.

I performed a very similar shoot to that I did for the F300EXR and the rest ofthe EXR long zoom family. Here, I used the good tripod with the two cams mounted ion exactly the same location. The Tamron 28-78 at f/8 served as the lens for both. Dialed to 50mm for the D300 and 75mm for the D700. This should have given identical framing. The fact that it did not quite do that indicates that the Tamron at 75mm is shorter than it should be. No shock, but annoying all the same.

Here are the images at 100 ISO in 800px form. And for sh-ts and giggles, I will include the F300EXR image for small sensor representation.

D300

D700

F300

Not much difference … even the small sensor can keep up mostly …

Now let’s see them at their highest practical ISO …

D300 at 6400 ISO

D700 at 25600 ISO
F300 at 1600 ISO

All three are pretty similar where noise is concerned … the D300 retains a lot of detail, in fact almost all that I can see, with only a few spots (e.g. center of flower) starting to look a wee bit mushy from shadow noise. This applies to the D700, but at 25600.

The crops will show this more clearly.

These were shot in jpeg with slight capture sharpening in ACR and slight tweaking of noise and sharpness on the top ISOs. This to represent how well these hold up. The probabilities based on the crops are that the noise is pretty much equal to the D300 at 6400 somewhere between 12800 and 25600 for the D700 …

I.e. it is as predicted by DXO Labs:

The Fuji at 1600 looks very nice for a small sensor … but areas like the halo around the head make it quite clear that low contrast details are long gone.

F300EXR – Review Part 4 – ISO Ladder in Low Light

This is the big one … here is where we find out how the cam performs indoors with low light of a decent color. The cacophony from the cheap seats on the Fuji forum has been ringing with demands of “post originals” and with the usual “wow, those are horrible” … all this without an understanding that the crops I post really are originals. Exactly what the cam has produced pixel for pixel. And the lighting in my stress test was truly despicable … the whole point was to see what they could do with bad light. The F70 survived adequately and the others took the expected beating.

So for this test, I am including much larger crops. The three cameras are shot from tripod with IS off. Manual mode. Exposures identical in most cases with a few caveats:

• The focal lengths had to be about the same to get similar magnification. This because the size of details makes a huge difference to the Fuji NR algorithms. But this forces a difference in aperture. The F70 and F80 were shot at f/4.7 … their maximum magnification point. The F300 was shot at f/4.3 because the cam is faster at that same magnification. This is actually a tiny advantage for the new cam, although it amounts to about 1/6 of a stop, which is well within meter error. What this means overall is that the F300 gets a tiny bit more light, and there is no way to prevent it.
• The F300 had a brain fart at 400 and 800 ISO for reasons unknown. These images are slightly darker than all other images in the test. The exposures, however, are the same as the other cams. So I would say that Fuji has introduced a bug in their firmware.
• The shutter speeds are not perfectly matched in some of the higher ISO images. Not off by much, but not perfectly matched. Just a few and I think they are isolated to the F80.

On shooting manual:

The user interface in the F300 has changed dramatically by the introduction of the wheel. I was not even aware of it until I tried shooting manual. Took me a while, but I found that the wheel would changed the currently selected attribute (shutter or aperture) and up would change which was selected. This leaves the ability to change the aperture or shutter live while changing flash, macro and timer settings. But I find the wheel too easy to tweak while using it for other settings as well. The moded interface of the F70 and F80 was better in my opinion.

Now … to the test. First, I am going to show you the 100 ISO images from all three cameras. I think we can all agree that these are close enough that the differences do not matter.

F70

F80

Look at that wild saturation :-)

F300

The perfect balance in my opinion.

Note: Remember to click through to see the bigger images. You know who you are :-)

Now let’s see the 1600 ISO images …

F70

F80

F300

Hmmm … the details are not bad at all at 800px. The main difference here is that the F70 continues to retain more low contrast details at 1600 and 3200 ISO. If you look at the details that the F70 preserves at 3200 ISO, you will realize how incredible this little sensor really is. Too bad they could not leave well enough alone.

Now … crops to really show the differences …

The two anomalous shots tick right out, but the details are not harmed by the cam’s brain farts. The F80 changes WB backj to F70 standards at 3200 ISO. That’s peculiar. The F300 closely matches the F70 in color and saturation.

But all three look really nice to 800 ISO. Remember that this is very low light. 3200 ISO at 1/8s is low, low, low … but the color of the light is good, and the subject was close to the cam.

Now … here’s a treat for those who feel they just need to see the originals in all their glory. Download a 48MB zip file with all 18 images here.

And for those who will post smugly that they forced me to post originals, go suck an egg. My testing is expected to take weeks and I will not post all originals. This is exactly the kind of test where the originals have great meaning and are worth putting in others’ hands.

Regarding my copyright:

You have permission to view my originals on your own machine. You have permission to comment on them as you like. You may post these images in whole or in part so long as you use them to enforce a factual technical point and so long as you include an attribution back to me and to this article. Any use other than as outlined here is a violation of my copyright.

F300EXR – Review Part 3 – Some random shots from the first day …

I did not post everything I shot on the first day, interrupting that flow in the middle of last night to shoot and post the high ISO test in rotten light. The F300 did an acceptable job there, but we saw the F70’s sensor again take the checkered flag. Frustrating, considering how easy it would be for Fuji to get clever and market a version of the F300 with the F70 sensor in it … offering an extended resolution mode where the F70 output is merely upsized to 12mp … heck, with this trick they could go up to 14mp if they resized before they sharpened and they would beat the absolute pants off of the competition …

Anyway … back to the first day shots. I captured some images in the deep woods where I was forced to use very high ISO just to get a decent shutter speed … these were to be hand held at full zoom. The high ISO images in good light at full zoom are quite a bit better than the low light high ISO shots in bad light … this I attribute to the lack of need for Fuji’s selective noise reduction, which leaves the details mostly intact.

Let’s have a look … and remember that these are generally processed images. I will tell you when they are straight from the cam.

First, I fel like trying the flash out. I stood in a dark area looking at a leaf that was back lit by a very bright area. I should have captured that image, I regret not doing it. The leaves were basically black. So I switched flash on to slow sync and shot an image with a typical exposure of –0.33EV … the image looks good, but the background is blown … I did use ACR to recapture as much as I could, but there really was no way to get it all back with such a bright exposure. Here is that image.

Remember to click through :-) … I find this image quite appealing. The leaf is *wicked* sharp! As shown here in crop:

And do note that the top right corner, with the leaves fairly close to the focal plane, is not a disaster. It looks quite acceptable …

I thought I’d then thry to preserve the background by dropping exposure dramatically. So I shot –1.67EV! That’s al;most 2 stops underexposed. Obviously, I was forced to open the shadows in ACR quite a bit, but the background was saved. The leaves were again perfectly exposed by the flash, but here we see that the first shot looks better because there is more contrast with the subject … i.e. sometimes a high key presentatiopn can work for you …

The other very noctieable issue with this image is that it is back-focued. The leaves above and behind the main subject leaf are in perfect focus and the subject is a bit blurred. It is not blindingly obvious after processing, but it is there. I find that the new fancy AF algorithm does make mistakes sometimes. No more often than the other EXR cams, but one would have hoped for much better accuracy with phase detect.

I then pointed the camera skywards, since the 24mm field of view should look pretty impressive.

That’s not bad at all. The top right corner is again tolerable, unlike the first shot I posted. I am somewhat pleased. However, there is quite a bit of CA showing (it’s a classic image for that) so I thought I would take a shot at that with ACR.

Yes, I find that slightly better. Which one you prefer is a matter of taste.

While looking at the canopy of these woods, I spotted a group of leaves being blasted by the sun. I thought the F300 might do that some justice in DR400 mode, so I shot it. It’s a pretty image, although I decided to add some vignette to really emphasize the subject leaves.

Next I turned my attention back to the floor of the woods themselves … I shot a long distance image on my tripod head at full zoom, which required 1600 ISO to get a decent shutter speed and avoid blur … 1/80s is two stops under what is normally needed at 360mm …

It’s not a bad result. The background is a bit grainy, but they definitely work hard on smoothing that out with the NR algorithms on this cam. Works ok …

Here are some crops for you to see that the details are not too bad for 1600 ISO … remembering again that this is the 1/2” sensor with too many pixels on it :-)

Then a hand-held close-up of some bark. Lovely tree … also required 1600 ISO …

The floor under the tree was covered with the pretty little plants and one dead leaf … also 1600 iso …

A long zoom shot follows … an area of dappled sunlight and dark woods makes for a near impossible image … 800 ISO …

I turned my attention to a farm across the highway from these woods … the tower shown here was back-lit so I boosted compensation to +2/3EV and ended up opening shadows even a bit more. The cam chose 100 ISO for this one …

 

I removed some CA from the top two wires in the deep corner of that shot … many would  not even have noticed it …

Back to the floor of the woods … 800 ISO again fighting dappled sunlight …

Back out the focal length a bot and you get 400 ISO at –1EV …

 

My son woke up a bit later and we decided to catch breakfast at our local establishment … I’ve shot images here before. We were seated near some big windows and I decided to shoot a few images for fun.

A fairly classic macro image … I like the tones. This is straight from the cam at 400 ISO … only resized and output sharpened.

My son refused to be photographed that day … but you can see the colors as we mix the daylight from behind me with the lights on the ceiling … note that the lights are not burnt out.

I shot a girl from 15 feet away past the should of my son and the girl sitting behind him … the image turned out decently for 800 ISO …

Now, what would I do with it if trying to process it as a portrait? And a free crop for you …

Out in the parking lot, some gulls about 50 feet away … cropped … –2/3EV …

Shopping cart through my windshield …

When we arrived home, I shot some images in deep shade on my front lawn, which is extra long after traveling and then being busy several weekends in a row …

Full zoom on this cam works really well I find …

Could not hold the highlights on this stem of a Hosta … but the leaf is very sharp at 800 ISO …

A dying Ostrich Fern at 400 ISO …

A neighbor’s house across the street … long way away shows the massive reach … this is straight from the cam …

As others who have had the cam for a while can attest … this thing is fun to shoot. The results are very nice in decent light … and even the 1600ISO shots in the woods are pretty good.

F300EXR – Review Part 2 – Quick Test of White Balance in Difficult Light

For those who remember, the F80 failed miserably in difficult light with custom white balance. At high ISO it has bags of nasty chroma noise. So I am dying to try the F300 in that light at that setting. A few shots only, just to see if that issue might have improved. I will start with 3 images that were shot at 800 ISO in lighting that was adjusted down to about 1/10s at 1600 ISO … that’s very low light. Cropped to 1.6mp to really show details and with white balance adjusted, I also ensured that the camera was facing the subject *and* the light … in other words the subject was back lit.

Yes, this test is extremely unfair. But it answers the question “what can I expect for detail when shooting in a dark bar under crappy colored lighting?” The answer is … not much unless you have the F70, and then just a bit …

So … without further ado …

Note: For the challenged who insist that these are too small … as with every single one of my blog posts … *click through* to see the larger versions.

F300EXR 800 ISO cropped to 1.6mp and then downsized to 800px.

F70EXR

F80EXR

My analysis: These are 800 ISO, which is the last ISO at which you can retain any fine details in light this bad. And then only with the F70. The F80 remains terrible with too much chroma noise from the over saturated jpeg engine. The F300 looks like the F70 for chroma noise but it retains no more detail than the F80. Some of the bigger details are more visible though because of better chroma noise, so the F300 is definitely morep leasant to look at than F80 images.

Which again raises the specter of the utterly BRILLIANT camera that Fuji would have had had they just put the 10/5mp EXR sensor in the F300 and then offered an extended mode for 12/6 by internally upsizing. That way, they could mention 12mp on the marketing brochures and they would have far better low light performance than they do with the F80 or the F300. For small details, anyway.

Now let’s look at some fairly large 100% crops that illustrate the differences a bit more clearly.

Two things stand out:

1. The detailed engravings between letters on the “Bank of Jamaica” band near the top are clearly visible on the F70 800ISO crop only. Missing from all others. The extra 2mp really make their presence known here. And interestingly, the details all over the bill are clearly superior on the F70 image at the top of this article. The other two have less obvious details all over.
2. The F300 jpeg engine went back to the appropriate saturation of the F70 jpeg engine. The high saturation experiment of the F80 is over. Fuji should have fixed that in a firmware update for the F80.

Second crop …

One thing stands out: The F70 800 iso crop is outstanding. It retains great 3D visual impact with the lettering. The F300 is surprisingly good, almost equalling the F70 here for both 3D impact and grain in the wooden handle. I suggest that this is Fuji and their selective NR again … it kicks in less intensely when the light is good and this part of the image is certainly much lighter than the first crop area.

So … the F300 is superior to the F80 for chroma noise and for detail handling in brighter areas. This suggests that Fuji have toned down the NR in brighter areas and that they have returned to the saturation settings of the F70 after wrecking the F80 jpeg engine. Very good.

But in this horrid light, the lower pixel density of the F70 makes a huge difference with small details. No contest whatsoever …