Fujifilm FinePix F100fd

I'm a professional photographer and I've owned a Fuji F10, F30, F50 and now the F100. The F50 was the only dog of that group. The F100 I feel has just as good low-light performance as my beloved F30 but with twice the resolution. You can look at my blog at http://rickleephoto.blogspot.com and click on the "Produce" tag and see that weeks #122 and up are shot with the F100 at ISO800. The color and sharpness are stunning. With the F30, I always had the camera set on minus 1/3 or 2/3 stops to avoid overexposure. I think that problem is solved on the F100. I love the extra wide-angle we have now. That really extends the usefulness of the camera.

As for the pink banding problem... I really don't want to start calling people names, but honestly, I've always found that there will be a group of people who approach photography from an "engineering" standpoint rather than an artistic one. We need the technical nerds to do tests and such, but I've never seen this problem show up in a real-world photo. I've seen a lot of stunning photos by some good photographers done with this camera and none of them suffered because of this problem.

Let me say right off the bat that I'm an owner of a previous F-series camera, the F31fd. I love that camera but I wanted the image stabilization and the wider wide-angle, which the F31 doesn't have.

When I first opened the box and tried out a few dozen shots, I was disappointed. Using the F100 as I had used the F31, I thought the results weren't as good. I wasn't used to the new controls, I missed the Manual-Aperture-Shutter- priority and the top-mounted Mode dial. (By the way I haven't encountered the purple band issue.)

But after several weeks I've changed my mind. The lens is sharper, the zoom is greater (on both ends), the response is just as quick, and I'm finally accustomed to the new rotating 4-way control. I never use Scene Modes, but the new Portrait Enhancer is awesome.

If you're new to Fujifilm pocket cameras, you will LOVE the F100. If you're like me and you previously owned an F31, I say give the F100 a chance.

Hints for those who owned the F31:
* in bright contrasty daytime shots the F100 underexposes where the F31 overexposed. Use "Spot" metering in bright daylight on the F100 and your problems are solved.

* Sunny shots seem a touch more bluish on the F100 than the F31. Use "chrome" or even better, set White Balance to "shade". Works great.

* again in low-light shots, the F100 exposes more accurately where the F31 overexposed. Forget Exposure Compensation, use plain ole AUTO mode (yes!) on the F100, it works fine.

* Miss the Manual mode for very dim lighting? Use "Night" mode, it now works automatically all the way down to 4 or 8 full seconds.

* With the new 4-way control on the F100, does the Menu-within-a-Menu annoy you? Easy fix: just HOLD DOWN the OK button longer and you jump straight to the inner Menu. (This is not in the manual!)

I bought this because I hoped it would be an upgrade from my favorite digital camera, the Fujifilm F30. Unfortunately, it is not better overall.

The F30, which is out of production, developed something of a cult following in techno-nurd circles because it had the incredible sensitivity of ISO 3200 with low noise (speckle). Fuji accomplished this with their "Super CCD" using hexagonally packed, larger sensors for greater fill factor and the ability to capture lower light intensities. (CCD photodiodes typically operate pretty close to the quantum limit of efficiency, so there is no possible improvement except by larger pixels.) The technology was brilliant but worked well only up to about 6 megapixels for the small chip size used in pocket cameras. Unfortunately Fuji's marketing people were not as imaginative as their semiconductor team and did not know how to persuade the buying public that dim light image quality is more valuable to the average photographer than pixel count - which it is. Caving in to the pixel race, later Fuji F cameras had more but smaller pixels, giving up the extreme low noise, low light capabilities. As a result used F30's sell at high prices on eBay.

Now comes the F100, which Fuji advertises as the pocket camera to end all pocket cameras, state of the art in every way, and which is supposed to extend the low light theme to 12MP, offering ISO 3200 for full resolution and up to an astounding ISO 12,800 with pixels reduced to 3MP.

So, how does it work? I've just spent the better part of a spring day comparing the F100 images directly with my F30 under various conditions.

Unfortunately, no, they did not manage to repeal the laws of physics. At ISO 3200, the 12MP F100 with its necessarily smaller pixels gives rougher images than my 6MP F30. And as for the ISO 12,800; forget it, it's a gimmick. The images are so rough as to be useless. This irritated me; borders on deceptive advertising.

The higher pixel count does stand up better to higher magnification or cropping. In good light where it is possible to use ISO 200, the F100 gives wonderful photos which can be cropped or blown up significantly more. But for the unique higher ISO range for which people look to Fuji, the F100 is actually a bit worse in image quality. Disappointing.

Otherwise, the F100 gives the impression of a pile of disconnected features There are worthwhile features in the F100 over the F30; one is the wide angle lens, the equivalent of 28mm, uncommon on pocket cameras; another is active image stabilization which allows slower shutters. Also F100 accepts SD memory cards whereas the F30 only took oddball proprietary xD's. In my tests however, the benefit of the Wide Dynamic Range feature seemed hard to discern. The battery seems to discharge pretty quickly. The nice aluminum case of the F30 has been replaced with Chinese plastic. (By the way, I read about a "pink banding" problem with the F100 but did not observe this.)

Otherwise, some of the annoyances of the F30 remain; a strange USB connector which won't work with your non-Fuji cables. The movie mode, for me one of the really cool features of a pocket camera, has not been improved at all; it is still not possible to zoom the lens while capturing a movie. The zoom itself is too hard to control, always overshooting one way or another - Hey guys, what would be wrong with a simple manual ring to zoom the lens?

Most Japanese cameras and all Fujifilm cameras including this one are marred by byzantine, obscure, hard to remember menu systems, packed with a plethora of "scene modes" certain to be ignored by the type of user who would buy an advanced digicam in the first place. They serve no purpose except to clutter things up. The other day in a store I saw a digicam that boasted of "Fifty Scene Modes!" Fifty?? Hey folks, what happened to the idea of a POINT AND SHOOT camera??

Overall, I admire Fujifilm which is one of the world's premier imaging technology companies. But as with many large corporations, its products are designed by uneven committees; brilliant CCD people, me-too market people, and an interface team who muck things up based on false assumptions. Companies which produce really great products, like Apple, do so because one person with excellent design sense governs the whole development.

Bottom line: I was disappointed because the F100 was not a clear advance over my two year old F30. It does have a nice wide angle lens, and if you don't mind the high price you may love it. In good light the photos are superb. But overall it does not give the sense of a well integrated product. Once the dim light capabilities are compromised, the F100 is just another camera which competes with many others.

I think overall this is one of the better compact digital cameras (that is pocketable) in its class. Other cameras that I would consider in this class are: Panasonic TZ5 and Canon SD870IS.

OK, first of all, the issue of pink banding. Out of 200+ test images that I made, I noticed 2 of them have minor pink banding, and these are shot at ISO1600. I am guessing some batches of F100fd do exhibit this problem worse than others. I've seen samples on the web where pink banding is obvious even on ISO400 and ISO800. On my ISO400 and ISO800 samples, which I took in various low lighting conditions (outdoor dusk, indoor incandescent lighting, indoor daytime in dark room), there is no noticeable pink banding. Fujifilm will release a firmware in May 08 to fix this issue, so this could end up as a non-issue in the future. For me, pink banding is not an issue since I will never use ISO1600. And I only print less than 0.01% of all my pictures, I can crop the pink banding out if necessary.

I think F100fd is a moderate improvement over F50fd. With F50fd, ISO800 has too much noise. But with F100fd, ISO800 is quite usable. In fact, I think F100fd might have the best low light performance in its class. F100fd also has a very good edge-to-edge sharpness performance in wide angle.

While I think F100fd is overall a very good compact camera, no camera is perfect. Here are some of its weaknesses:
- Overpriced. I think $299 is the fair price for this camera.
- No manual control (A/S mode). F50fd has it.
- No flash compensation. To be fair, not many compacts have it either.
- No Auto Exposure Bracketing. Panasonic TZ5 has it.
- No histogram. Useful to check over/under exposure.
- 5x zoom vs TZ5's 10x zoom.
- Controls are not user friendly.
- Short battery life. F30/F31 can shoot more than 500 pictures with one charge.
- LCD screen size. Panasonic TZ5 has a 3" and 400k resolution screen.
- Pink banding? Unless Fujifilm can fix it 100% with new firmware.

UPDATE:
After two weeks of use, here're more observations:
- 300+ shots in one charge (about 30 shots or less using flash).
- Generally fast auto focus performance, unless in low light which sometimes it hunts a little bit.
- Zooming in and out is too fast, almost have to try a few times to get to the desired zoom distance.
- Acceptable LCD performance in daylight, at noon, the LCD is still visible, so framing under bright daylight should not be a problem.
- Shot to shot time is respectable, generally about 1 to 2 second. But if flash is used, it could go up to 3 to 4 seconds.

I was contemplating getting the Panasonic TZ5 due to its superior features, but I think for now I am sticking to F100fd, and wait for the next TZ6 or TZ7. Panasonic has been improving the TZ series, so the next TZ could be a great one.

I tested the F100fd I received through Amazon for the pink banding problem described by the previous reviewer, and it does not appear to have that problem.

Also, I compared shots with this camera in moderate daylight to my Canon SD950 (both are 12MP and similar in size). I shot the same scenes at ISO100 (ISO80 on the Canon) and at ISO400. In terms of noise levels, the results were practically identical. The automated exposures and color turned out to be quite similar as well. At ISO400 on these cameras, fine details and textures are largely blurred out relative to the lowest settings, which produce a very fine-grained noise. I would tend to avoid using ISO settings beyond 400 on these cameras.

Before receiving this camera I was concerned that the very useful 5x lens zoom range (28mm-140mm) might be compromised by distortion and softness, but the results are impressive for a camera of these dimensions. Over the middle range, the sharpness was slightly better than that of the SD950 (zoom range 36mm-133mm), especially near the frame edges.

Recently, Canon released a 5x zoom model (SD890IS) with the relatively less useful range of (35mm-180mm). It has a 10MP sensor of smaller dimensions (1/2.5" vs 1/1.6").

On the basis of my (so far, very limited) experience with this camera, I would rate it one of the best in its category. The minus one star is for the lack of manual shutter/aperture controls (available on the F50, F30 and other earlier Finepix models) and for apparently not controlling noise any better than Canon at ISO levels up to 400.