Fujifilm S9600
3/4 front and
back
sample images: one,
two,
three,
four, five,
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Details at a glance
Megapixels: 9
Optical Zoom: 10.7x
Digital Zoom: 2x
LCD: 2 inch
Storage: CF, xD, M
Internal: 26mb
Size: 128 x 93 x 129mm
Weight: 650g
We clicked with
Quick focusing, intelligent flash, bundled software
Shots in the dark
Noisy at ISO 400 and above, camera control software doesn't support this camera, expensive
Links
More Fujifilm information
www.fujifilm.co.uk
Price Comparison:
Fujifilm FinePix S9600
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Why Choose a Bridge Camera?
You might wonder why you would want a bridge digital camera. Well there's the 28 - 300m lens for a start. Great for landscapes, portraits and macros. No changing lenses and no worries about your sensor getting dust on it. I already have the S9500 and it's a great all round camera but I found for sports photography it was quite slow at focusing and I missed quite a few shots so I was interested to see if the S9600 would live up to its promises.
Upgrade Features of the S9500
As this is an upgrade from the S9500 I shall concentrate on what's different. You can read up on the S9500 to get all the other features. So, as one of the main differences between the S9500 and the new S9600 is said to be the faster focusing and the better anti blur I took it along to a car event that I wanted to cover. I really noticed the difference in the speed of focus and once I had turned off the auto-preview of the photographs I found that I could manage to take a lot more shots straight after the other. With the S9500 I found I was lucky if I could manage 3 shots on one test. From turned off, to up and ready to shoot its much quicker. I was really pleased.
Fujifilm is probably one of the only cameras that achieves anti blur through upping the ISO rather than through image stabilisation. To test this out I used it on the anti blur setting for most of the day just to see how it coped with moving cars. It was a very bright day and there was a lot of contrast between the shade and the sunny areas. It struggled a bit with exposure and I got a lot of blown highlights but to be fair it was very difficult with the sun low in the sky and such a bright day. On the photo in the example1, the camera chose ISO 200 and when you zoom right in there's no noticeable noise. Another that was taken in shade was pushed up to ISO 400 (example4) and it looks a bit noisy when you zoom in but when printed at 6 x 8 inches its passable.
Next I experimented with taking a photo indoors using natural light (example2). I then set it on the antiblur (example3) and took the same photo. Auto set the ISO to 400 and the anti blur setting produced an ISO of 800. It looked quite noisy when I zoomed in so I printed them both out at about 6 x 8 inches. The one taken at IS0 400 is fine but the other one is a bit too noisy in my opinion.
Fuji say that one of the improvements from the S9500 is an increase in sharpness and resolution. This is achieved through their new image processing algorithms. I've compared images from my S9500 and the S9600 and can't see any difference to be honest. They're both pretty sharp.
Big and Tilting
Another improvement is in the size of the LCD. It's now a 2-inch LCD monitor with 235,000 pixels and the tilting LCD screen on the Fujifilm FinePix S9600 means you can shoot at any angle, such as close to the ground or above the head. Unlike conventional digital SLRs, it can also be used to compose images which some people will like. It's nice and clear and I found that even in the bright conditions on Sunday I could still see the image. The Fuji uses an electronic viewfinder to though so if it's too bright to see the screen you can view your images that way instead.
Is it Intelligent?
Then there is the intelligent flash which is supposed to give clearer brighter backgrounds without blowing out the foreground. I took a few photographs indoors at night and it worked fine with the backgrounds looking far better balanced compared to the photos from the S9500.
A Bundle of Something!
The software bundled with the camera is Fuji FinepixViewer which will download your photos and enables quick 'fixes' to your images and lets you view a slideshow etc. However, the bit of software I was interested in was the Hyper Utility Software. I had been debating about buying this for my S9500 as it wasn't bundled with the camera and I hadn't found a decent Raw Convertor for it and therefore wasn't using Raw at all. The Hyper Utility install includes Raw Conversion and camera control (similar, I think, to Nikon's). Unfortunately I couldn't test the camera control bit of it as it only works for the S2 pro, S3 pro or S20 pro, yet it installs all the software for it on your computer. You don't get any options not to and as far as I can see you can't remove it afterwards without uninstalling the whole caboodle. So now I have a new entry in my programs called Studio Utility with 4 sub entries S2 Pro, S3 Pro, S20 Pro and Studio Utility that is frankly useless. I tried using it with the S9600 but it just said there was no camera attached.
The Raw Conversion software looks pretty good although I wonder if it's worth paying the £99 that Fuji are asking for it if you don't have it already. If you are using Photoshop there is a plugin for Raw for the S9500.
Camera specification
Camera specification
| Mega-pixels: | 9 |
Photo: | JPEG, RAW |
| Optical Zoom: | 10.7x |
RAW: | Yes |
| Digital Zoom: | 2x |
Aperture: | f/2.8-11 |
| LCD: | 2.0 inch |
Focal Length: | equiv. 28-300mm |
| Dimensions: | 128 x 93 x 129mm |
Shutter: | 30 sec to 1/4000 |
| Weight: | 650g |
Exposure: | ISO 80 to 1600 |
| Storage: | xD, CF, M |
Movie: | 640x480@30fps |
| Int. Mem: | 26mb |
Battery: | 4 AA |
| Interface: | USB 2.0, AV |
PictBridge: | Yes |
