Fujifilm S5 Pro
This feels like a little bit of deja vu, but for the second month in a row for this project I am starting a review with mixed feelings about a camera. The shorthand version of this review is “Great colours, frustrating output.”
Now that might have reduced the readership of this review by some margin, lets carry on with a little more detail on this unusual Frankenstein-ish camera from a really interesting time in digital photography.
In the latter days of 2006, specifically September 25, the last camera resulting from a collaboration between Fujifilm and Nikon was released. This collaboration had always involved a significant amount of Nikon hardware being paired with Fujifilm’s sensor and processing prowess. Consumers were met with a camera wearing the skin of the previous year’s Nikon D200, albeit with an intriguing Super CCD badge near the lens mount, and a slightly unfamiliar button layout on the back of the camera.
The focusing system, ergonomics, battery grip etc were 100% Nikon D200. Holding the camera today next to my own D200 feels very much like going into a neighbour’s house and realising it’s exactly like yours but everything is backwards. The camera handles identically up until you enter the menu system. System is a little misleading, more accurate would be to say “Systems” as there effectively two menu systems for this camera. Neither have any commonality with Nikon’s and are pure Fujifilm.
The first menu button allows access to most of the image making settings, and the second “Setup” button hides a number of system settings and function-focussed items. It’s sort of like a left and right brain setup, creative and logic settings separated into two menus. Somewhat confusingly the first menu button is also the “OK” button, which definitely takes time to get used to if you are more familiar with the Nikon way of usually offering a separate button for this feature.
This dual system philosophy occurs elsewhere in the camera’s operation too. Most notably in Playback, the camera allows zooming in on a photo with the directional pad, but requires you to switch to “Panning” mode to move around the image. This makes checking focus on anything not in the middle of the picture a bit of a struggle between zooming and panning and remembering the mode you are currently in. This is without considering the very poor visibility of the display in outdoor lighting.
All of the above is compounded by the Nikon D200’s focussing system borrowed by this Fujifilm camera. It is not confidence inducing, it does not hunt an abnormal amount but it may just be a little over confident in its own capabilities.
This was an issue first noticed when using a wider angle lens, where the camera did not want to admit it had no idea where I was asking it to focus and instead beeped to confirm it had acquired focus – somewhere – but the image that resulted was just out of focus and a little fuzzy. After a few weeks working with the camera I have now worked out many of its limitations and the ways I can best take advantage of the camera. I have also found my copy of the camera has an issue with all lenses where it will back-focus ever so slightly. This means it will confirm focus but in reality the picture is actually focussed just behind where you thought it was, and in regular use this has minimal effect and is completely mitigated by using narrower apertures where depth of field hides almost all of the errors this can cause.
These issues could be somewhat rectified had there been an S5 successor, with access to Nikon’s D300 body and its much more advanced focussing system. Alas, no such camera exists, so this is what we have to work with.
I really want to talk about the star of the show, at risk of sounding a little down on the camera with all this talk of its limitations, the sensor really shines (that recurring theme in each of my camera reviews) and for quite a unique reason.
So far we have seen a CCD sensor in the Olympus E-1, and a CMOS sensor in the Canon 5D. Fujifilm pushed the boundaries of sensor technology at the time with some very specific skills on display. Firstly, and actually least important of these skills, was the ability to use Live View. This is the first camera in my project to allow for that feature, although only for a short 30 seconds. The second, and to my mind most important aspect of the camera’s sensor is the dynamic range it can achieve. This is because of the kind of sensor it is, a Super CCD sensor, and so proud are Fujfilm of this fact they place a badge near the lens mount to shout loudly about it.
Does it make a difference? Yes, yes it does. Compared to the regular, non-Super, CCD sensor in a D200 there is a great deal of difference in terms of the available dynamic range. This makes itself most noticeable in the amount of highlight recovery possible in any S5 Pro image and was the first thing that I saw on early shots of my furry live-in model. Her fur in places is very white, and photographed in direct sunlight easily blows out and loses detail even on modern cameras.
This is all really impressive stuff but here is where the camera loses me ever so slightly, because it handles RAW and JPEG files VERY differently. JPEG files bake in the film simulations (Yes, this camera has the original style of film sims Fuji was doing way before their current selection) and writes a file that reads as 12 Megapixels. Great, you might think, as that is the same resolution of the Canon 5D from last month. However, the reality is closer in resolution to the Olympus E-1’s 5 Megapixel sensor. How is this possible? It’s that ahead-of-it’s-time sensor again! Instead of an array of square pixels the Super CCD sensor has hexagonal pixels, and effectively a balance of large and small ones at that. So each pixel is actually two photosites one for shadow detail and another for highlight detail. The camera interpolates this as 12 Megapixels when saving a JPEG, but a RAW file is always seen by programs like Lightroom as 6 Megapixels. The actual resolution between the two files isn’t that drastically different and I have been able to upscale a RAW file to 12 Megapixels in post and get slightly more detail that way.
This camera had been very positively reviewed by Portrait Photographers on release, as that use case would mean the subject more completely fills the frame, and as such makes the best use of this resolution, I can really see how much sense this camera makes as a Portrait powerhouse. For the landscape work I put it to, however, it falls a little short. The dynamic range and highlight recovery is incredibly impressive but there is a definite lack of detail available. This I believe is less to do with the low resolution of the sensor and more to do with a very heavy-handed anti-aliasing filter implemented to reduce Moiré (the stripes of colour that occur with tightly patterned details) by slightly blurring those details to avoid the unwanted artefacts. So the small details in trees in the distance are very much reduced with this camera. So a great technology for a very specific type of photography but perhaps not the best option for my photography.
I would recommend trying the Fujifilm S5 Pro, it is a marvel of Frankenstein-manufacturing from the earlier days of Digital SLR’s. I still sit in awe of how much I can reduce the highlight slider in Lightroom, remembering all the time how old this camera is and how little I paid for it.
A smaller review this time as I did not LOVE this camera the same way as I have the previous month’s cameras. I wouldn’t hesitate to use it for a portrait project however, especially if I could deal with (or at some point fix them completely) the focus problems I encountered. Now, a new month means a new camera, onwards and upwards!
