If you've not heard of the FinePix S5000, you may want to read our earlier news item covering the launch before continuing any further. To recap very briefly, the camera has an SLR-like form factor with a 3.1 megapixel SuperCCD imager, unstabilised 10x optical zoom lens and a high-resolution electronic viewfinder. Two different sets of sample photos are available, of greatly differing quality.

On the Fuji Japan site are three outdoor photographs, one of which is a macro photo. Fuji USA has four photographs, three of them portraits and again all taken outdoors. The Japanese photos are displayed at 1:1 in your browser; Fuji USA has taken a different approach and rescales the images in the browser to fit on the screen. Neither is an ideal way to view images, so we'd suggest right-clicking on the small thumbnails below and saving images to your hard-disk, and then viewing them in an image editor or printing them out for a better idea of the image quality.

Fuji Japan sample photos

.

Probably because of the interpolation that gives the 3.1 megapixel SuperCCD its 6 megapixel file size, these photos do look rather unimpressive viewed through a web browser. Download them, though, and it is a different story. There is some blooming and JPEG artifacts, as well as (depending on the photo) quite a bit of noise or the "impressionist" effect that generally results from overaggressive noise reduction. Bearing in mind that this is a pre-production camera, though, the images aren't so bad. Consider that this is really a 3 megapixel camera with a sensor arrangement that requires a 6 megapixel output file to retain the maximum detail. If you resize the images back down to around 2048 x 1542 pixels to account for this, the samples suggest the camera has promise if Fuji can get a handle on the noise, and avoid the heavy-handed noise reduction visible in some of the samples.

Fuji USA sample photos

.

The sample images we checked have no EXIF information attached, so there is no way to know what camera settings were used. As always, we recommend readers take sample images such as these as only an indication of what the final product may be able to do. There is no way to know what conditions the images were captured in, whether they have been retouched in any way, and what will be changed in production-level cameras.