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Fujifilm Finepix S100fs 11.1MP Digital Camera
Review by David Em FUJIFILM Electronics ISBN/ITEM#: B0012Y541S Date: 29 March 2009 List Price $699.95 Amazon US / Amazon UK Links: Official Site / Flickr S110FS Uploads / Show Official Info /
Fujifilm's 11-megapixel S100FS is what's known as a "bridge camera". Bridge cameras occupy the space between consumer point and shoots and professional DSLRs with interchangeable lenses. The S100FS tilts to the pro side of the digital camera spectrum. Except for the interchangeable lens part, the S100FS has most of the capabilities you'd expect to find in a true DSLR, including a plethora of external and internal controls, RAW image capture, and an extended dynamic range. I took the camera on several field trips, and with only a few caveats, was impressed with its performance. A FULL BODY The S100FS (the FS stands for Film Simulation, we'll get to that later) isn't a small camera. It weighs in at two pounds without a battery, and measures roughly 5-inches x 4-inches x 6-inches, so it won't fit into a pocket, even a big one. Even to a trained eye, it's indistinguishable from a DSLR. I liked the camera's look and feel. It's well balanced, the rubberized hand grip's comfortable, and my thumb and forefinger settled naturally on the right controls. The body's size allows for a large number of features to be easily accessed via buttons and switches rather than having to dig through screen menus to turn them on and off. I particularly appreciated the dedicated ISO button and metering mode switch. The camera has a big Command dial you rotate to set Auto mode, Aperture and Shutter Priority modes, Program modes, and Manual mode. There are preprogrammed settings such as Sports, Portrait, Night, and Snow, and you can save specialized settings of your own. There's an integrated flash and a hot shoe for an external flash. The internal flash isn't the brightest I've ever seen, but it's fine for adding fill light in a pinch. You can plug in an optional wired remote control, a very handy tool for tripod shooting that should be standard on all semi-pro and pro cameras. The S100 uses a proprietary lithium ion battery that's adequate for most situations, but if you're planning on shooting more that a couple hundred shots at a time, you'll want a second battery, which will run you about fifty bucks. EVF AND LCD Another difference between the S100FS and a DSLR is it doesn't use an optical viewfinder. Instead it employs an electronic viewfinder, also known as an EVF. I'm not too crazy about most EVFs, but this one's better than most with a high-res 200,000 pixel display. If the subject you're tracking is moving fast though, the EVF loses sync and you get a stuttering image with weird color artefacting. On the plus side, the S100FS also uses a 2.5-inch LCD screen that's easy to see in daylight. You can extend the screen out from the body of the camera and tilt it up ninety-degrees or down forty-five degrees, enabling you to get visual feedback in ways you can't do by looking through an eyepiece or using a standard LCD display mounted flat against the camera's body. Tiltable screens are great for waist and over the head shots, as well as tripod work. Unfortunately, the LCD doesn't also rotate side to side, which would make it more useful still. I found that I used the tilting display capability a lot, but there were many instances where rotation would have provided a big assist. ONE HECK OF A LENS The S100's fixed Fujinon lens features an impressive 14.3X zoom that goes from 28mm to 400mm and is nice and sharp through its range. In manual mode, you can zoom and focus the lens by means of a ring on the lens barrel. As you might expect, the lens distorts somewhat at the extremes, but overall I was very satisfied with the lens's range and flexibility. In addition to making the far near, it can make the near nearer, allowing you to get up to 0.4-inches from your target in wide-angle Super Macro mode. There's surprisingly little pincushioning and barrel distortion. The lens produces chromatic aberration at some focal lengths that's sometimes objectionable. You can combat that in software, which of course means an extra step, but considering the versatility the lens offers at a very moderate price point, that may be a reasonable trade-off. FEATURES The Film Simulation mode emulates the characteristics of Fuji films such as Provia and Velvia. The camera has a related mode that brackets three shots with different film simulations. This is perhaps handy for longtime users of those film types, but I personally am happy to shoot RAW and make my adjustments from there. The S100FS uses a Dual Image Stabilization system as well as Face Detection and Automatic Red Eye Removal, all of which seem pretty effective. You can bracket high dynamic range settings to emulate the response of color negative films. As near as I can tell, this involves the camera adjusting tone curves of the captured image to increase visibility in the darker portions of the image. Menus are generally well organized and laid out, although you have to do a little digging to get to some features. Fuji provides a software package for processing RAW files called FinePix Studio, but it's slow and convoluted compared to Adobe's RAW workflow tools. The camera records video in 640 x 480 VGA resolution at 30 frames per second. It captures nearly fifteen minutes of action per gigabyte of card storage, and twice that at 320 x 240 res. It records in two gigabyte increments. Unlike some video implementations in still cameras, you can zoom the S 100FS's lens. It can take several seconds to lock focus when you change focal points, but in general it performed surprisingly well at this task. PERFORMANCE The S100FS starts up in just under two seconds, which is OK but not spectacular. The camera has 25 megabytes of internal memory, enough to buffer three RAW shots a second, which is pretty good when you consider that the device's RAW files are a whopping 24 megabytes apiece. At 3-megapixel resolution it can handle fifty continuous shots at seven frames per second. The camera accommodates both xD and SD cards. I tested it with SanDisk's 16GB SanDisk Extreme III card that attains a sequential read/write speed of 30 megabytes per second. Depending on your camera's resolution and internals, this card should be able to record continuously, regardless of the size of your camera's memory buffer. In order to offload your photos from the card, you'll need a card reader with high-speed support such as SanDisk's ImageMate Multi-Card USB 2.0 Reader/Writer. Working in conjunction with the S100FS's internal memory, the Extreme III produced a seamless shooting experience. It can hold about 680 24 MB RAW files, more than enough for a reasonable days's work. IMAGE QUALITY The S100FS captures 11-megapixel images with Fuji's eighth-generation 2/3-inch Super CCD that uses an octagonal honeycomb grid of sensor sites designed to capture more light and yield a higher dynamic range than garden variety sensors. As implemented in the S100FS, I found the sensor delivered on its claims on the high end of the tonal spectrum, the bright areas that often blow out in digital photos. One example that stands out is a shot I took on the freeway a few minutes after a big rainstorm. The road was wet, and the light bounce from the newly emerged sun was so bright, I could hardly see a thing. I pointed the S100FS at the scene, and when I looked at the photographs later in Photoshop, I was astounded to see that the camera's sensor had recorded a tremendous amount of high detail information on the roadway. The camera's sensor registered the visual data better than my own eye, and that's impressive. I wasn't nearly as pleased with results on the dark end of the spectrum. There the camera recorded a measurable amount of visual noise, even in scenes where there was considerable light. There wasn't nearly the amount of color noise that many sensors produce; the effect was more of a pebbly grain pattern. The camera will mitigate some of this effect when it writes out JPEG files, but for this it uses a noise reduction algorithm that compromises detail, so the best way to deal with it is probably to selectively target the trouble spots with noise reduction software. The S100FS has ISO settings that go all the way up to ISO 6400 at 6-megapixel resolution and ISO 10,000 at 3-megapixels, but these are just fun numbers to throw around. In reality anything over ISO 800 is pretty groaty, and I tried to keep it down to a ceiling of ISO 400, and ISO 100 or 200 whenever possible. CONCLUSION The S100FS is solidly constructed, very versatile, and delivers sharp images with good color. Its many pro features and 14.3X lens guarantee you'll nail almost any shot you go for. The lens has a measurable amount of chromatic aberration, but then so do lenses with similar capabilities that cost more than twice the price of this entire camera. My biggest ding is the "pebbly" noise in shaded areas, which I couldn't figure out how to eliminate. When the camera was originally released, it sold for nearly $800, a price that's directly competitive with a number of entry-level DSLRs, making it a bit of a tough sell for its intended audience. That figure's since dropped to under $500, and at that price point this camera is a truly great deal. Recommended. |
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