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- Barry
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i just wondered how many Fuji S5 pro owners there is on here and why you chose it ?
It renders beautiful colours and the dynamic range is superb.
Slow as a week in jail though!
Got one cos it was cheaper than a Pentax a year or so ago and I thought I'd be snapping nekkid ladies for a calendar. It's ass backwards, but that's thanks to Nikon, who don't seem to understand ergonomics.
Pentax is better.
At one point, they got down to £420 brand new from calumet
I loved mine, could push it to iso1600 if need be, as opposed to a max 'usable' of 800 from the D200, great pictures and dynamic range... but yeah, slow as hell... if your camera is always recharging slower than your lights then you know something's wrong!
i don't really know how to take comparative shots that will show the difference but i'll do some if people suggest things to shoot on my d300 and s5 (if i can find the bloody battery)
Yes me too ...nice camerasI knew I should never have opened this thread!
Can somebody be kind enough to point me in the direction of a cheap Fuji S3?
Cheers Stuart
Not interested in 4/3
The S5 stressed the APS form factor at 6MP due to the photosite size. Cramming that onto a 4/3 sensor... Even if they kept it at 6MP (Which for marketing reasons they wouldn't, because the PhotoTards would complain about lack of MP for their 800px Facebook photos) the pixel density would cripple the ISO performance.
Not saying I wouldn't mind a decent GP1-style camera, but y'know.
12MP 35mm, that would be worth something.
The S5 Pro was a great camera. I really enjoyed mine , great dynamic range but very slow and produces massive RAW files. Needs top quality glass because of the strong low pass filter to avoid soft looking images.
Flash has mentioned this to me.
Can I ask what you mean by "top quality" I have what I conciser Medium quality glass. Does this mean I should go and find another camera to fantasize about?
Cheers Stuart
Well my Tamron 17-50 always looked soft on the S5 whereas it was tack sharp on my D300. Primes were fine. The Nikon 17-55 is supposed to work very nicely on the S5.
I know the EXR. I would like to see it in 35mm or APS format.
AFAIK Fuji are out of the SLR market. There's rumour 4/3 might be on the way, but I won't believe a word of it.
That is quite amazing.......
GAH!
The internet consumed my 1st attempt at a reply, this one will be abridged as I'm short on time.
The Interface -> I prefer it to Nikon's weird-ass-backward menus and adore it compared to Canon's interesting take on user friendliness. The people who complain about the Fuji menu's are people who are complaining about it being different to the Nikon setup. There is nothing wrong with the Fuji menus, in fact they're better than Nikon for a couple of functions, just different.
The Speed -> most people can count on one hand the times they have needed a motor drive. 99% of shots, it's your timing that counts and a motordrive at 5-8 fps is going to be either side of the critical moment anyway. It's not a sport camera, but I don't shoot sports Some people really do need speed, some people merely THINK they do. Most people fall in the latter category. FPS will never ever be a factor for me in cameras, afterall I'm happiest when shooting film.
Those two classic complaints out of the way, I bought mine as an upgrade from my S2 because of excellent colour, best-in-class DR and RAW files so flexible that when forced to work with nikon and canon files it feels having your hands tied.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/denyerec/3294453393/
That shot was white on the LCD, recovered with -4EV in lightroom. The colours were fine, but I preferred the B&W. not an incredible image, but shows how badly you can screw up and how well the Fuji will save you. Also the extended DR manifests itself in different ways than just "Oh look what a blown photo I can recover". For example, large dynamic shifts in colour channels that blow out on inferior cameras hold their ground on the Fuji, allowing you to get away with murder in Lightroom.
The camera will NOT unplug shadows. You MUST expose to the right if you want maximum detail, but then with a 4-stop overhead, there's practically no risk in leaving the camera set to +1 EV and pulling everything 1 stop in Lightroom on import. Providing you can live with the LCD never really showing you your exposure (And, irritatingly, the histogram shows you only the 8-bit space and not the full overhead, making it impossible to judge when you really have blown it) this is a straightforward way to work. Clients don't much like looking at the LCD though...
Would I upgrade to a D700 ? No.
A D3x? Maybe.
Mamiya DM33 ? Yes.
Hopefully Nikon's next "D800" will have a colour range and malleability on a par with the venerable S5. If it doesn't, I'll just sit tight for another 18 months. My web/A3 output is just fine so until I get asked to do something that needs either more MP or a motor drive, I'm not feeling the need to "upgrade".
Am I a fanboy? Unreservedly. Beyond the subject in the frame, photographs are about light and colour. The Fuji nails both.
Will dig out some before/after shots of landscapes later if anyone's interested.
Dont own a fuji but did get to use one for a weekend and im a nikon only man really but the tones for portraits and landscapes are cracking and you really can drag tons from a raw file.. however if you shoot nikon and use the nx2 software id say its near as dam it the same in terms of tonal range and ability to pull back blown shots.
not a perfect shot by any stretch but the only tweak on this was convert to black and white.
heres a landscape from the same body and same very very wet weekend!