Starting-points for selecting a digital camera

• limited budget, about 300 Euro
• image quality more important then options and appearance
• RAW-fileformat available for best quality
• at least 5 Megapixels CCD

 

Fuji FinePix E900 complies well with these starting-points. It's a fine camera to have and start exploring the world of (professional) digital photography.

It is NOT a SLR-camera. For this and a better image quality you need a camera that is at least twices as expensive.

 

 

Technical data

• 3.488 x 2.616 pixels
• 9.0 Mega pixels (effective)
• 5th-generation Super CCD HR
• 4x zoom 32-128mm
• 2.0-inch TFT, 115,000 pixels
• Shutter delay 0,01sec
• ‘Real Photo Technology’
• Full manual functions

 

see also: http://www.fujifilm.com -> products -> digital -> E-serie -> E900

 

RAW and JPG

RAW-files are considered the digital equivalent to the old 'negative'. RAW-files contain all color-information recorded by the CCD.

RAW-files, about 18 mB per photo, are downloaded to your computer and converted to TIF-files with Fuji RAWconverter LE which comes with the camera. This results in a TIF-file of 4864x3648 pixels (about 52 mB).

The TIF-files are free of JPG-compression artefacts.

There are some disadvantages to using RAW-files:

• recording a photograph takes longer (about 4 seconds)
• RAW-fies need extra conversion to TIF-files
• TIF-files are bigger then JPG, and you should also keep the RAW-files

 

RAWconverters

Several free and commercail RAWconverters are available for creating your TIF-files.

S7RAW is an excellent, freeware RAWconverter.

On the website of Matt Spinelli you can find lots of information about S7RAW.

A comparison of several RAWconverters can be found in this PDF: http://www.whisper-wood.co.uk/FujiRawConv.pdf (about 10 mB).

 

My experiences: the Fuji-converter for the E900 works fine!

With S7RAW you can achieve the same or better results but it will cost you a lot of time. For lens-corrections you have to experiment.

 

Digital noise

The higher a ISO-equivalent, the more digital noise a photograph will have.

Fuji-camera's have low noise levels.

For removing digital noise I use Neat Image.

 

Examples

Fragment from a TIF-file, ISO80, F8, 1/105

The example below was resized to 200% to make the comparison easier:

 

Original (200%):

 

After removing noise with Neat Image:

 

 

Tips for noise-free images

• ISO80
• RAW-fileformat
• sharpness 'soft'
• conversion to TIF-file 4864x3648 pixels, with Fuji RAW-converter LE
• digital noise filtering with Neat Image
• resize to 3488x2616 pixels (300dpi)

 

 

 

 

 

 © J.E. Kuiper