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We clicked with:
Pictures look FANTASTIC, dynamic range works, great build quality
Shots in the dark:
Slower than a D200, menus are tricky, image zoom will drive you mad
Price Comparison:
Fuji S5 Pro
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Let's start with a crowd pleaser.
Browse through any review of any Fuji DSLR and you'll see references to some mystic stuff called “dynamic range”. The S5 has a twin layer CCD that lets you capture a larger dynamic range than most other cameras on the market. Sound dull? Check this out.
Three pretty boring pictures of a bluebell. The one on the left looks a bit pasty but they are all kind of acceptable for exposure. Now look at how they started life.
Yep, the one on the left was shot at 0.8 seconds, the one on the right at 1/290s (ISO and aperture were the same). That's 8 stops of difference between the exposures.
Some people who have trouble with exposure or shoot in difficult light stopped reading right there because they are checking where they can buy an S5 - underexpose a shot by 4 stops or overexpose it by 4 and you can probably salvage the picture.
But before we leave dynamic range and move onto the rest of the camera take a look at the snap below.
This has the kind of tonal range that I associate with HDR images - two exposures at different settings blended using some high powered software. The detail in the sky and grass looks ever so slightly surreal. You can get a similar effect by using the graduated filters that landscape experts love. Except that's one picture, without any filters shot as a jpeg and with just a small contrast adjustment in Lightroom.
A whole bunch of landscape photographers just started checking how much they have in their piggy banks.
Handling
I'm going to use these words a couple of times in this review - it's a D200. The Fujifilm S5 is a D200 with a different chip and different firmware. The D200 is one of the best handling DSLRs available from Nikon - if you've ever used any Nikon SLR (film or digital) you'll know where the main bits are on the S5.
Having said that, Fujifilm have done some rather odd things. I find the Nikon menu system extremely easy to use - the Fujifilm system is less good. I couldn't really find a logic to the way the menus were broken down. Pretty much every time I wanted an obscure option I went through all 3 shooting menus then the setup menu. Then back to the shooting menus… Fortunately this isn't a big deal because Fuji have left all the buttons alone so you'll only need to visit the menus occasionally.
The playback system on the D200 is an absolute joy to use - bump the magnifying glass then use the thumbwheel to zoom in and out and the multiselector to scroll around. Use it once and you'll love it. It's little short of amazing that with the same general concept and the same buttons Fujifilm have gone so badly wrong. Press the magnify button once and if the face detection finds a face it will zoom to that, if not it zooms “a bit”. Then you use the up/down controls to zoom in and out. If you want to scroll then hit the play button and use the 4 way controller to pan. Then press play again to zoom. It sounds OK but in practice this is just so frustrating. It doesn't help that when you are in “zoom” mode it shows “panning” and in panning mode it shows “zoom up” on the screen.
Face recognition is pretty cool allowing you to zoom to a face and check for sharpness. Like most face recognition sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. Overall I reckon it's quicker to zoom in to a subject's eyes on a D200 without face recognition than on a Fuji S5 when it finds a face. I'll take ergonomics over technology any day.
Build quality and accessories
I'll say this again, it's a D200. Best made Nikon body there is short of their pro line. This camera makes many of the consumer DSLRs I test feel like toys. It's engineered to keep on working. While you may not get weather sealing it feels like it could take a knock or two and still bounce back.
Accessories are a bit tricky. It takes a huge range of Nikon accessories but not all of them - you'd be wise to check before making a purchase.
Things that work include:
- pretty much all Nikon F mount lenses (some rare ones don't work and some older lenses don't meter through the lens but this is true of the D200 too)
- Nikon cable releases - I tried an MC-30 and a cheap Chinese radio trigger
- Nikon flash guns - for best results you may want to stick to the SB-800 or SB-600 or their 3rd party equivalents
- I'm delighted to report that the awesome Creative Lighting System works - you can even use the built in pop up flash to control two different groups plus the pop up. That's the same as the D200 and a change from the pre production S5 I tried
- The Nikon MB-D200 Power Grip (though see below on batteries)
And here are a couple that won't
- An EN-EL3e battery - or rather a D200 battery. Fuji have made their own batteries for the S5 and there's a chip so they can tell. Fuji batteries will work in a D200 but Nikon batteries won't in an S5. If you use the MB-D200 grip then you'll need Fujifilm batteries
- WT-3A. This is a WiFi transmitter for the D200. Fujifilm have told me that it won't work with the S5 and that they have no plans to make their own. If you need to WiFi your images then you need a D200.
- Nikon software - the raw file format is completely different so you can't edit S5 raw files in Capture NX or shoot tethered with Camera Control Pro. Fuji's Hyper Utility software (not supplied with the S5) handle both these. At time of writing, apart from the Hyper Utility the only software that can process S5 raws is Lightroom - I expect it to be added to Photoshop and other raw converters very soon.
OK, so what do the pictures look like?
You might have noticed I've been rather downbeat in the review so far. Here's why, as an objective reviewer I have to find the things about this camera that will let you down. Here's the deal:
The pictures rock.
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People are going to beat themselves up wondering if this is a 12 MP camera or a 6MP camera. That's because the sensor has 12 million or so photo receptors but some of them are more sensitive than others.
The closest analogy I can give is that it's like loading both ISO 100 and ISO 400 film at once and then sampling the best bits from each.
Some people like to call that 6 million pixels, some call it “6+6”, some go with the actual number and say 12.
You know what? I don't care. I've spent a couple of weeks dragging the S5 around with a variety of Nikon glass on it shooting everything in front of me. I took pictures inside a church at ISO 3200, I took them in a studio with lots of light at ISO100, I've taken portraits, landscapes, close ups and wide angles. You want all that testing condensed into 3 words? |
The pictures rock.
Slight contrast adjustment in Lightroom
Here are some of the reasons why the pictures rock.
The extra dynamic range works - check out the pictures at the top of this article. That all adds up to more detail in the shadows and highlights.
The colours are gorgeous. Notice how I've been pedantically calling this camera the Fujifilm S5. That's not just because Fuji like being called that - it's a reminder that Fuji have a long heritage in film. That's apparent from the S5. Skin tones look lovely and other colours look vibrant and fresh. You can tune these colours using various “film” modes which loosely approximate different emulsion types such as Fujichrome and Reala. More than any other DSLR I've picked up lately you can produce beautiful jpegs out of the camera without bothering with raw.
White balance is pretty much dead on. My D2X is the best camera I've used for auto white balance and the S5 runs it pretty close. The only small trick with the white balance is that the LCD seems a bit cool. Until I was used to it, I tended to tweak the white balance a little to make them look good on the LCD. This made them a little too warm on my calibrated system.
Noise is very, very acceptable. Here's a crop from the worst case noise I could come up with.
That is a 100% crop from a picture taken in a dark church. It was shot at 3200 ISO and deliberately underexposed by a stop and then brought back up in Lightroom. Sure there's noise - but not very much considering the shooting info and the colours have stayed relatively true. Often in very high ISO images other cameras produce a kind of misty effect across the picture.
Speed
OK. We have the landscape people and the portrait fans licking their lips. Anyone who shoots a lot of low light pictures is starting to look interested. Let's stop the techs at Fujifilm feeling too big headed.
I set the S5 to Raw+Fine jpeg and turned the dynamic range up to 400%. This gives the biggest possible files and so should represent a worst case scenario. The raw file is about 25MB and the jpeg is 5MB or so. The compact flash card was a 4GB SanDisk Extreme III - a good quick card.
I fired off 7 shots to fill the buffer. This took 6.3s. It was a further 2.2s until the first file was written to the card. At this point I could see the first image on the LCD and the camera could take another shot. The buffer then took a further 32 seconds to drain. That's not too bad - overall it took about 40 seconds to write 210MB to a fast card.
What I didn't like was how the camera acted while writing the files. After the first file the screen would not come on again until the buffer was empty. On my first day with the S5 I happily fired off a bunch of raw+jpegs using a very slow card.
I gave up checking them on the screen because the camera was always writing and would not show me the pictures until it had completely emptied the buffer. This is odd behaviour and means than firstly you are well advised to use a fast card with this camera and secondly you mustn't shoot bursts if you want to chimp them.
Shooting only fine jpegs with dynamic range on 100% (“standard”) I could shoot and write 7 jpegs in just 10.5 seconds. In addition the buffer goes up to 16 shots in jpeg only mode.
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