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Fuji FinePix S20 Pro Fuji's latest electronic SLR offers a high dynamic range Super CCD (6.7 million photosensors in a 3.4 megapixel array) that interpolates to 6.0 megapixels, plus an external flash sync connection! Select a topic Reference: Datasheet S20 Pro Photo Gallery! S20 Pro Sample Images --------------------------------- 1. Intro and Highlights 2. Executive Overview 3. Design 4. Viewfinder 5. Optics 6. Fuji's "SR" Sensor Technology 7. Exposure & Flash 8. Shutter Lag & Cycle Time Tests 9. Operation & User Interface 10. Camera Modes & Menus 11. Image Storage & Interface 12. Video, Power, Software 13. Test Results & Conclusion --------------------------------- Print-Friendly Review Version Additional Resources and Other Links Reader Comments on S20 Pro Review --------------------------------- Digital Camera Comparometer (TM) --------------------------------- <-- Digital Cameras (Home) <-- Digital Camera Reviews Index <<Fuji's "SR" Sensor Technology :(Previous) | (Next): Shutter Lag & Cycle Time Tests>> Page 7:Exposure & Flash Review First Posted: 04/27/2004

Exposure

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Exposure control on the S20 Pro can seem a little complicated at first, given the number of external controls and their spread-out layout. Once you get the hang of it though, camera operation becomes very common-sense. The large number of external controls is actually a great time-saver, helping you avoid fishing through LCD menu screens for common settings changes. The S20 Pro also features the FinePix menu button, as found on several of Fuji's other higher-end cameras, which provides quick access to the resolution, sensitivity, and color settings.

The remaining exposure modes on the dial offer a range of manual control options. Program AE lets the camera control shutter speed and aperture, but gives you control over all other exposure variables. A nice feature here is that rotating the Command wheel cycles through a range of equivalent exposure settings, letting you choose between wider apertures and faster shutter speeds or the opposite. (A nice touch, since this is often what you're trying to accomplish when you'd otherwise drop into Aperture or Shutter Priority mode.) Aperture and Shutter Priority modes both offer limited control, letting you adjust either the lens aperture or shutter speed while the camera picks the best value of the other variable. In both modes, turning the Command wheel adjusts the setting you're controlling. An exposure readout on the LCD reports whether the resulting shot will be under- or overexposed, giving you a chance to change the setting. Finally, Manual exposure mode offers total exposure control, letting you select both aperture and shutter speed together. In all exposure modes other than Auto, Scene Program, and Manual, the Exposure Compensation adjustment lightens or darkens the overall image from -2 to +2 exposure equivalents (EV) in one-third-step increments.

Exposure times range from 1/1,000 to 1/4 second in Auto and Scene Modes (1/250 to three seconds in Night mode), while Programmed AE, Aperture Priority and Shutter Priority modes range from 1/1,000 to three seconds. Conversely, Manual mode increases the range to include exposure times from 1/10,000 to 30 seconds, and a Bulb setting (for arbitrary exposures up to 30 seconds in length). Turning the Command wheel alone in Manual mode sets shutter speed, while holding down the Exposure Compensation button and turning the wheel adjusts the aperture setting.

By default, the S20 Pro uses a multi-segment metering system, which bases the exposure on readings taken from 64 zones throughout the frame. The camera also offers Average and Spot metering modes, accessible through the settings menu. Average metering reads the entire scene and bases the overall exposure on the average value. Alternatively, Spot metering bases the exposure on a reading from the very center of the frame (good for high contrast subjects, or off-center ones, when used in conjunction with the AE Lock button). The metering mode is indicated only within the menu system, there's no icon in the LCD viewfinder display to show which exposure mode the camera is operating in. The AE Lock button lets you lock the exposure for a specific part of your subject, by aiming the camera to center the area you want to base exposure on in the viewfinder, and then pressing the button until the AE Lock icon appears on the LCD display. The exposure will remain locked until the AE Lock button is pressed again or the Shutter button is fully pressed and released. While you can achieve much the same effect with most cameras by half-pressing and holding the Shutter button prior to the exposure, that approach has the sometimes undesired side effect of also locking focus. You may not need it often, but when you do, a separate AE Lock control is invaluable.

If you're not sure of the exact exposure to use, an Auto Exposure Bracketing function snaps a series of three images at different exposure settings, making it easier to get a good exposure in critical shooting conditions. You can set the exposure step size for these series through the Record menu. The camera captures one image at the normal exposure, one slightly underexposed, and one slightly overexposed.

In any of the non-automatic exposure modes, the camera's ISO sensitivity setting can be adjusted to 200, 400 or 800, regardless of the resolution setting. Selecting the 1600 ISO equivalent forces the camera's resolution to 1.2 megapixels because this ISO value relies upon Fuji's Pixel Data Coupling, which combines data from groups of four pixels at a time. (Image quality is automatically set to Normal at the high sensitivity settings.) In Auto exposure mode, the ISO options include Auto, 400, 800 or 1600. (The Auto ISO setting supposedly adjusts the sensitivity from 160 to 800 automatically, but on my sample unit, I could never get it to automatically boost the ISO above 400, no matter what I did.)

The S20 Pro has a full range of color balance settings, adjusted through the White Balance option. Choices include Auto, Custom 1, Custom 2, Daylight, Shade, Daylight Fluorescent, Warm White Fluorescent, Cool White Fluorescent, and Incandescent settings. The two Custom settings are manual adjustments, and base the white balance on a white card placed in front of the camera. These settings are saved in the camera's memory, allowing you to recall either the Custom 1 or Custom 2 setting at any time. (Having two separate custom white balance settings can be very handy if you're shooting in an environment with mixed lighting.) In addition to white balance, a Sharpness adjustment lets you control the in-camera sharpening, offering Hard, Normal, and Soft adjustment settings. A Color adjustment lets you record images in Standard Color, Black-and-White monochrome, or Chrome. The Chrome option raises contrast and saturation for more vivid images.

For delayed exposures, the S20 Pro's Self-Timer mode offers two- and 10-second countdowns between the time the Shutter button is fully pressed and when the shutter actually fires. The 10-second option gives you time to compose the shot, then run around in front of the camera to get into your own pictures. The two-second self-timer option is very handy when you have the camera propped on a tripod or other support for a long exposure, and don't want the pressure of your finger on the Shutter button to jostle it. With the short self-timer option, you can prop the camera, trip the timer, and the shutter will release a couple of seconds later, after any vibrations have died down. A useful feature!

What's up with RAW?

Like many high-end digicams, the has a "RAW" file format as an option. If you're new to the world of high-end digital cameras, you may not be familiar with the concept of the "RAW" file format. Basically, a RAW file just captures the "raw" image data, exactly as it comes from the camera's CCD or CMOS image sensor. So why would you care about that? - RAW files let you manipulate your images post-exposure without nearly as much loss of image quality as you'd get with JPEG files. A full discussion of RAW file formats is way beyond the scope of this article, but Charlotte Lowrie of MSN Photo has written an excellent article describing the benefits of the RAW format, titled A Second Chance to Get It Right. Check it out, it's one of the clearest tutorials on RAW formats I've seen yet.

 

Flash
The built-in, pop-up flash on the S20 Pro has one of the longest operating ranges I've seen yet on a digicam, reportedly effective to 27.9 feet (8.5 meters) at full wide angle. (At telephoto, the flash is effective to 25.9 feet (7.9 meters). I wasn't able to test either of these claims though, because my flash-range test setup is limited to a maximum of about 15 feet, but the flash did indeed seem to be very powerful. The flash operates in one of six modes, all accessed by turning the Command wheel while pressing the Flash button on top of the camera. Modes include Auto (lightning bolt icon with an "A"), Red-Eye Reduction (eyeball icon), Forced On (lightning bolt), Forced Off (lightning bolt with a slash), Slow-Synchro (lightning bolt with an "S"), and Slow-synchro with Red-Eye Reduction (eyeball with "Slow" beneath it). Auto, Forced On, and Forced Off are pretty self-explanatory. Red-eye Reduction means that the camera fires a small pre-flash before the full flash, to reduce the occurrence of the Red-eye Effect. The Slow-Synchro modes combine the flash with a slow shutter speed and are good for night subjects because they allow more ambient light into the image. (This helps avoid the common syndrome of a ghastly white subject in front of a pitch-dark background so common in flash shots from low-end cameras.) A small release button on the left side of the flash (as viewed from the back) releases the flash from its compartment. Note that the flash must be popped up in order to change its operating mode. A brightness adjustment accessed through the settings menu increases or decreases the overall flash power from -0.6 to +0.6 EV in one-third-step increments. This is handy for balancing flash exposure with light coming from other sources in the scene, although as with the FinePix S7000, I'd really like to see it extend further toward negative exposure compensation, for those times when you really want only a subtle fill-light.

The external flash hot shoe on top of the camera features a single contact, and hosts a range of Fuji and generic third-party flash units, apparently synchronizing to shutter speeds as fast as 1/1,000-second. The shoe has only a single contact, so flash interaction will be limited to simple contact-closure, synchronized with the lens opening. New on the FinePix S20 Pro is an external flash sync terminal (the so-called "PC" style), which accommodates just about any third-party flash unit. This makes the camera much more appealing to photographers who already have an existing strobe system for the studio. The PC Sync connector is triggered regardless of whether the internal flash is in use or not, but the external flash hot shoe cannot operate together with the internal flash, so the pop-up flash should be closed when an external flash is being used on the hot shoe.

Movie and Sound Recording
The S20 Pro's Movie mode captures moving images with sound at either VGA (640 x 480 pixels) or QVGA (320 x 240 pixels) resolutions. Full VGA resolution movies are big news in and of themselves, but when you add the fact that the S20 Pro will acquire them at a full 30 frames per second it's even more impressive. Not enough? Consider that it can also grab VGA-resolution movies at 30 fps without a gap, up to the full capacity of the memory card! (No buffer limitations, but you do have to have a very fast memory card to keep up with the high data rate.) It's still not a digital video recorder, and the files you end up with are really huge, but there aren't a lot of cameras with such a capable movie mode. (Although 640x480, 30 fps movie modes are becoming much more common than they were just a year ago.) Movie recording stops and starts with a full press of the Shutter button, and a timer appears in the LCD monitor to report the available recording time. Most of the exposure features are adjustable in Movie mode, with the exception of flash, digital zoom, and the high-speed still-capture shooting options.

Voice Memo Mode
Accessed via the Playback menu, a Voice Memo mode lets you record short sound clips to accompany already-recorded still images. Voice captions can last as long as 30 seconds. When activated, Voice Memo mode begins recording audio immediately, with a recording indication on the LCD screen.

Continuous Shooting
The S20 Pro offers a range of high-speed shooting modes, all selected by holding down the Drive Mode button and turning the Command wheel. The available modes are called Top-10 Frame, Auto Bracketing (discussed above), Final-10 Frame, and Long-Period Continuous Shooting.

Perhaps the most interesting of the continuous modes are the ones called Top-10 Frame and Final-10 Frame. Top-10 Frame captures ten consecutive frames at intervals as brief as 0.2 seconds, depending on the file size and quality settings. After the series is captured, all images are displayed at the bottom of the LCD screen as thumbnails while they are being recorded to the memory card. Final-10 Frame mode captures as many as 40 frames at the same five fps frame rate while the Shutter button is held down. The camera then records the last ten frames of the series, recording what happened just before you released the shutter button. Final-10 Frame mode is thus especially handy for capturing fleeting moments. If you're like me, you always recognize the perfect expression on your child's face or the perfect pose by your pet a fraction of a second after it's gone. With the Final-10 Frame feature, I can finally capture all those previously-missed moments, since the camera effectively reaches back in time to grab what I was looking at up to two seconds before I released the shutter button.

For more extended rapid-fire shooting, Long-Period Continuous Shooting mode works only in Auto exposure mode, and automatically sets the image resolution to 1.2-megapixels. What you gain though, is the ability to capture a maximum of 40 frames at intervals as short as half a second. As with the Movie mode though, you do need a fast memory card to get the best performance from Long-Period Continuous Shooting mode.

Multi-Exposure Mode
A Multi-Exposure mode lets you overlay images in the same file, for a double-exposure effect. Activated through the settings menu, Multi-Exposure mode continuously overlays exposures until you tell it to stop, merging each new image with the one (itself possibly also a composite) already in memory. A preview screen appears after each shot, so that you can check the effect. You can also opt to return to the previous version of the image (before your last exposure) and start over from there. I'm honestly not sure what use this might be, as it seems easier to do this (with more control to boot) in an image-editing program. It's there if you want it though.