Spot the difference...
Take a look at the two pictures above. OK both of them are pretty dull and uninteresting but which do you prefer?
The first picture was taken by my beloved D2X. There are lots of things I could have done to improve it by setting tone curves etc but that is manual metering, manual white balance and the Sigma 30mm 1.4 lens. It's shot at 3200 ISO (which Nikon actually advise against using) at f/1.4 1/60s hand held. The only light in the room is from the candles. The second has exactly the same exposure settings (including white balance) and is shot on the same lens. If it hadn't been late at night then the framing would be the same. It was shot on a pre production Fuji S5. My D2X retails for around £2,700. The S5 is expected to hit the streets in February and if you shop hard you should be able to get one for around the £1,000 mark. The D2X has a lot to recommend it but on this simple test the S5 kills it at high ISO.
Before you read any more, stop and read this.
Fujifilm loaned me a pre production S5. This is not the final release and pretty well anything can change between now and the shipping day. When you read about anything especially image quality you should bear this in mind. In addition ALL tests were done using jpegs only. The S5 will shoot raws but at the moment no software can read them. Fujifilm didn't send any software with our pre production model. I'd expect the retail version to have their own software and Photoshop and the other editors to catch up soon after launch. We'll be reviewing the S5 as soon as it lands but couldn't resist the chance to kick the tyres on this one before anyone else.
Handling
This one is very simple - it's a D200. Cover up the badges and you'll be hard pressed to spot any differences. Some of the buttons on the back have changed slightly but that's about it. In use I found some of the review modes a little counter intuitive but it would be unfair of me to comment on these because a firmware upgrade would remove them all and there's every likelihood that I wasn't running on the final firmware.
What you need to know is that it has a mag alloy body, a shutter that sounds like it will last forever and a general solid build that lets you know this is a quality piece of kit. None of that should be a surprise - this isn't something like a D200, it's a D200 with a Fuji chip and Fuji firmware. The D200 is a very well built camera and so's the S5.
By the way, if you're worried about lenses relax. That's a proper F mount with both kinds of autofocus. It will take any lens a D200 can. Vibration reduction worked on the 70 - 200 VR I slipped on.
Speed
If you know anything about the Fujifilm S3 Pro then you'll know it's slow. For studio work lots of pros love it for accurate skin tones and gorgeous colours but it's slow. Very slow.
I was warned that the S5 I had was running on test firmware so speed may not be as good as a production level model. Naturally I did some timings... I would expect a production camera to be no worse than these. Actually I'd expect the final release to be tuned and perform better than this so bear in mind these should be worst case figures.
I set the S5 to raw+ fine jpeg with extended dynamic range set to +400%. This should be the absolute slowest that the camera can perform since it's having to write two huge files. I slipped in a SanDisk Extreme III card and got ready with the stopwatch.
The buffer holds 7 shots and I fired these off in 4 seconds, there was then a 7 second delay before I could take another shot as the buffer wrote to the card and a further 22 seconds until the buffer was empty.
Quality set to fine jpeg only and dynamic range set to 100% and here are the numbers. The buffer holds 16 shots in fine jpeg but it's writing whilst reading (just like all DSLRs). I fired off 24 shots in 8 seconds and the buffer was completely empty again in a further 15 seconds.
I've used a number of professional level cameras including the D2H with its 8 frames a second - I can't remember ever shooting a burst of more than 24 shots in any real world situation. Whether 3 frames a second is enough for you (though remember this number may well come up) depends on what you're shooting but certainly for jpegs I'm happy to call the S5 fast enough for me - and that's assuming final firmware doesn't speed the camera up.
7 seconds to write a raw + jpeg is a reasonably long time but with the 7 shot buffer I don't think that will be an issue for many people. It's disappointing that it drops below 2 fps in raw + jpeg but at the risk of repeating myself this isn't the final answer.
Colours and stuff
Like the S3 Pro before it the S5 has more than your average number of colour modes. Fujifilm are best known for, well their film. You can leave the camera in "standard" mode or choose to replicate different kinds of film "look" Mode 1 is loosely based around portrait style films (there are 4 variants from silky smooth pro film look to a punchy fashion style) and mode 2 produces "high colour saturation like FujiCHROME (slide) film" - people are going to call this the digital Velvia.
I'm not going to discuss these too much for two reasons. Firstly they may change and secondly, well, I forgot which ones I used... I moved from F1 to F1c and back to F1a in a studio shoot. Unfortunately none of my exif readers can tell me which I used and I didn't take a note. What I will say is that the S5 I used has some of the most pleasing looking jpegs I've seen from a DSLR. Take a look at the "library" pictures (OK it's a fake backdrop). The images have a richness that can take a while to reproduce in other cameras. For reference I shot some pictures in the same lighting using a 1DsMkII (without setting it up carefully) and to my eye the Fuji colours are much more pleasant.
Extended dynamic range will take careful testing and I am unwilling to do this on a pre production version. Suffice it to say that most tests of the S3 Pro showed that it really did give you a better dynamic range than other cameras on the market. Put simply - more detail in the highlights, more depth to the shadows. I'd expect the S5 to be at least as good.
High ISO
This is where we started. The S5 has built in noise reduction like all recent DSLRs. Shooting jpegs you can never be entirely sure that you've turned this off completely. Again this is an area I didn't want to test scientifically only to find that all the results changed at production time. Some add hoc testing puts the S5 way ahead of the D2X for apparent noise. I didn't shoot it directly against a D200 but as a very rough figure I would estimate that the noise is about 1 stop better than the D200 - an S5 picture at 3200 looks as good as or better than a D200 at 1600. Whether the S5 is in the same league as the Canon 5D (our current favourite for low light) remains to be seen.
I didn't get the chance to print files in the short time I had the S5 but I think I would be happy squeezing a 10X8 out of a 3200 ISO file without any software noise reduction. There's no other camera that takes Nikon lenses that I can currently say that of. The colours are certainly better at high ISO than a D200 - as noise increases colours tend to look a bit "mushy". Check out the pictures at the top - that's what you're gaining with a Fuji chip.
Flash
It works like a Nikon. I took an SB800 and put it on the hotshoe set to "Focal Plane" mode. This allows synchronisation at high shutter speeds with compatible cameras and flash guns. In a darkened room I fired off the S5 at a range of shutter speeds from 1/4s up to 1/8000s. The pictures looked pretty similar - certainly enough to convince me that with the right flashgun (such as the SB800) the S5 will sync at all shutter speeds. With "ordinary" flashguns it will sync to 1/250s.
The Creative Lighting System is also supported and works, well, like it does on a Nikon D200. I didn't test the full set up with "3 + 1" groups of multiple flash guns but I tried an SB800 as commander and a second SB800 as a TTL remote. It worked fine. If I had to guess, I'd say they lifted the flash control system out of a D200. One disappointment was that I couldn't find a way to use the CLS with the pop up flashgun. This doesn't mean there isn't one but I couldn't find one on the review model.
One more thing
I was just cruising through the menus when I spotted an entry called "live view". This works in either colour or black and white (you choose) and lets you preview the scene on the LCD. You can also magnify part of the display for critical manual focus.
It only operates for 30 seconds, locks the shutter and I'll bet it kills your batteries but is very cool. I can think of some great uses for this (not least macro photography). As far as I know the Olympus E330 was the only DSLR to pull this off previously.
What's not to like
OK there will never be a perfect camera. Fujifilm have made what might be considered a blunder with their battery. The D200 battery doesn't work in an S5. There's a chip embedded in the battery that means you have to use a Fuji battery. The D200 grip will work (so I'm advised) but only with Fuji batteries. It's possible this chip does some important valuable work but the real benefit will be that Fuji make more money (since you can bet 3rd party batteries won't work either).
Battery meters are notoriously unreliable but a couple of hundred snaps didn't make the meter dip - I'd assume you'll get at least as good battery life as a D200.
The bottom line
For anyone thinking of buying a D200 - don't. Estimated street price of an S5 is about £1,000. D200s change hands for about £870. Several hours with a pre production S5 made me think that extra £130 is worth it - you get D200 build quality, Fuji colours and an extra stop of usable images in low light.
When the S5 is ready one of three things will happen:
- Something will go wrong and the S5 won't be as good as my sample - at that point you can buy a D200 secure in the knowledge you made the right choice
- The S5 will be pretty much the same as the D200 or not so much better that the extra money isn't worth it - so you get to choose whether to spend the extra money or not
- The S5 will be declared a better camera than the D200 - at which point you can buy an S5 or snap up a D200 as the price falls
My money isn't on either of the first two options. So, don't buy a D200 right now.
Finally...
A huge thanks to Fujifilm for making this happen - there are very very few pre prod S5s in existence and the first shipments are a while away. The parts are so new that the actually had to bike one bit 70 miles to me so the camera would be ready for our reader shoot out. I won't mention why this was...
sample images: one,
two,
three,
four, and
five
The Fuji S5 is available to preorder at
ParkCameras.
