Versatile but too complex

Author's Rating:

Pros: Innovative EXR sensor, 10x zoom lens, compact size, allows full manual adjustment

Cons: Complex settings not well documented, image noise, fuzzy image corners, plastic body

The Bottom Line: 
Innovative and flexible, could be a great all-round compact camera if not for a few drawbacks

Author's Review
The F70EXR broke new ground for Fuji when it came out last year, combining their innovative EXR sensor (first introduced in the F200EXR) with a 10x optical zoom. There are other compact long-zoom cameras, but the F70EXR is the most compact, and it is priced very aggressively compared to the competition. This year it has been updated to the F80EXR, but the changes are fairly minimal - the F80EXR has 12 megapixels instead of 10, HD video recording, a 3" LCD display instead of 2.7", and an orientation sensor. The F70EXR is now available at a substantial discount, and many people actually prefer it slightly to the F80EXR because the added megapixels in the newer model come with some disadvantages in terms of speed of operation and image noise. I couldn't resist the discounted price, even though I already have several other digital cameras (Fujis and Canons).

After using it for a few weeks, my opinion of the F70EXR is a bit conflicted. On the one hand, it has some great features that I've always wanted in a compact camera, but on the other hand I can't help feeling that it doesn't quite come together as a truly great camera. My review explains why, and I'll summarize at the end.

The F70EXR is a complex camera, so I'm not going to go into all the details - just the highlights that I think are important for someone thinking of buying one.

Headline Features:

The most important feature of this camera is the 10x zoom lens. Reaching all the way from an extra wide 27mm wide angle to a long 270mm zoom, this lens offers great shooting flexibility. With the wide angle you can capture wide panoramas outdoors or the full interior of a room indoors. With the long zoom you can get close-ups of subjects that would be too distant with a paltry 3x zoom lens. It zooms fairly quickly from one end of its range to the other, although it's a bit over-sensitive and hard to fine-adjust because of the long range and quick movement. The F70EXR has optical image stabilization, an essential feature for getting a steady shot with a long zoom (it uses the sensor shift method rather than lens movement as favored by Canon and Panasonic, but both methods seem effective).

Fuji claims that the F70EXR and F80EXR are the most compact long-zoom pocket cameras available. While it is a bit bigger and heavier than the most compact pocket cameras, and it may not be a lot smaller than other compact long-zoom cameras, there's no doubt that it is very compact, and the smooth shape slides easily into a pocket. It's the only long-zoom camera I've tried that I would actually consider carrying around in my pocket. Yet there is a price to be paid: the corners of the image are a bit fuzzy at the wide angle end of the lens zoom range, and the lens aperture is a bit smaller than short-zoom cameras. Another hidden price is that the image sensor must be smaller to fit the lens optics, aggravating the problem of image noise in low light. But you can't have everything.

The other headline feature of this camera is the EXR sensor. Fuji's EXR sensor is an enhancement of the standard CCD image sensor with 3 modes:
-  High Resolution mode is the standard "all pixels" readout (10 megapixels on this camera), equivalent to a normal CCD sensor.
-  Dynamic Range Enhancement mode reads out half the pixels part-way through the exposure to achieve a wider dynamic range at the cost of sacrificing half the resolution
-  Noise Reduction mode combines two adjacent pixels into one in order to improve the signal-to-noise ratio and decrease image noise in low light, again at the cost of sacrificing half the resolution.

While this is a genuine technical advancement which allows the camera to offer real improvement in image quality under some lighting conditions, there are a couple of caveats:
- It complicates the camera settings considerably, and Fuji has not done a good job of explaining them in the manual;
- The effects are usually modest, and photographers expecting spectacular results may be disappointed.

More on the EXR modes below.

Physical design and operation:

The camera looks nice enough in the dark "gun metal" finish with chrome trim, and it has a solid heft in the hand, but I think it feels just a bit cheaply made. It's immediately apparent that the case is made of plastic rather than metal, with a fingerprint-showing and easily-scratched glossy finish. The slide-out battery compartment door yields and creaks a bit when you put finger pressure on it, the shutter button is slightly loose and rattles a little, the function dial is made of plastic rather than metal, etc.. No major complaints, nothing that seems like it would break too easily - just a general impression of cheapness.

The 2.7 inch LCD screen is fine. It's bright and sharp, it has a good anti-reflective coating, and the visibility is as good as any in bright outdoor light. No optical viewfinder to help out in difficult viewing conditions, but few cameras have one these days. The shutter button with zoom ring and the on/off button are on top of the camera. The rest of the camera controls are positioned to the right of the LCD. There's adequate room for them while allowing a decent shooting grip on the camera. The F80EXR increases the LCD size without increasing the camera size, which seems to crowd the back of the camera a bit and leaves less space for fingers.

Battery and SD memory card slot are under a door on the bottom of the camera that slides out to the front. The proprietary combined USB/AV connector is under a flip-open door on the side of the camera. There's a metal tripod socket in the middle of the bottom of the camera. No power/charging jack on this camera - Fuji now uses an external battery charger, like Canon.

The zoom lens stores behind an automatic cover when the camera is turned off, and it hardly sticks out from the camera body at all, unlike some other long zoom cameras. When you turn the camera on it slides out quickly, quietly and smoothly in 3 segments

Camera operation seems reasonably quick, including startup/shutdown, shutter lag, inter-shot times, and flash recharge. The only noticeable delay is that the controls do not respond while the image is writing to the memory card after a shot.

User interface and menus:

Fuji's continuing experimentation with the button and menu layout on their cameras is just plain daft. A button dedicated to turning face detection on and off? Really, Fuji? That was the best thing you could think of for the 4th button you can never figure out what to do with? For goodness sake, just give up and make it a user-programmable button.

Fuji also continues with their dedicated F-mode menu button that brings up a separate menu with a few shooting settings such as ISO, image size, and film emulation type. But frankly I think this is inferior to Canon's scheme of having a full Shooting menu with all the shooting mode functions logically separated from the background camera settings on the main menu. I really wish Fuji would give up on this F-mode menu and just copy Canon's shooting menu.

The mode dial has 8 settings:

EXR - EXR Auto mode: Most shooting settings are set to Auto, and the camera will automatically select a scene mode (such as Macro or Night) and an EXR mode. You can set the EXR "priority" as Resolution, Dynamic Range, or Low Noise, or leave it on Auto and let the camera decide based on lighting.
Auto - regular Auto mode (like Canon's Auto mode): most settings are set to Auto and cannot be changed. No special EXR modes, no automatic scene mode selection.
P - Programmed Auto mode (like Canon's Manual mode): Allows user control of many shooting settings, but individual settings can also be left on Auto. (Shutter Priority only, since Aperture Priority wouldn't make much sense with only 2 apertures available.)
M - Manual mode: a true manual mode where you can set both shutter speed and aperture while referring to a light meter on the LCD screen (still only 2 apertures though).
SP - Scene mode: select from various typical scene modes (Night, Party, Fireworks etc) and some special shooting modes like Pro Low Light Mode and Pro Focus Mode.
N - Natural light mode: a scene mode which selects flash off and allows high ISO.
N + flash - Dual-shot Natural + flash mode, a special shooting mode which takes two sequential shots without and with flash.
Video - Video capture mode

Having separate EXR, Auto, P and M modes is probably overkill, but clever F70EXR users can to turn that to an advantage by having multiple different shooting options set up for these positions on the mode dial for quick selection.

The N and N + flash settings are an odd choice to include on the mode dial, particularly since they don't allow much customization of settings. They would have been better placed as an option under SP, where they were on previous Fuji cameras.

The video mode captures 640 x 480 x 30 fps standard def video in MJPEG format to an avi file. There's a low-res 320 x 240 option, but no other variations. Unlike many other cameras the optical zoom can be used during video capture, but it has to refocus after each zoom change, and it does make an audible noise on the sound track.

In both shooting mode and playback mode you can use the Disp button to toggle the image information overlay on and off. It shows the basic photographic information (image size, ISO, shooting mode, flash mode, f-stop and shutter speed, DR setting etc.), but it's not as comprehensive as Canon's version with the histogram and flashing overexposed highlight areas. As with most cameras these days, you can switch back and forth between playback and shooting modes by pressing the Play and shutter buttons. Fuji has added some interesting new playback index modes. In addition to their traditional 9-frame view and the sort-by-date view (now accessed via the Disp button), they have included a 2-frame photo-flow mode and a high-level index view with 100 miniature photos.

Using EXR mode and other special modes:

One of the most interesting things about this camera is the opportunity to experiment with the options offered by the EXR sensor. Unfortunately Fuji's manual does a particularly poor job of explaining how the EXR dynamic range settings work. It took me a lot of experimenting and internet research to figure it out.

The most important point that Fuji failed to mention is that the dynamic range enhancement on these EXR cameras actually uses two different methods, one based in hardware and the other a software algorithm. The hardware DR enhancement relies on the aforementioned ability of the EXR sensor to read out half the pixel values part-way through the exposure, and it requires the sensor resolution to be cut in half (i.e., 5 megapixels instead of 10 megapixels on this camera). The less-effective software enhancement is simply some post-processing adjustment of the gamma to attempt to show as much dynamic range as possible. When you select a 10 megapixel image size (the L = Large option) in any mode, only software enhancement is used. In this case the hardware dynamic range enhancement feature of the EXR sensor is not used at all. Only when you set the resolution to M = Medium (5 megapixels) does the hardware dynamic range enhancement come into effect, and then only for certain ISO settings. There's no indication showing when hardware DR is used, and Fuji hasn't provided any technical guidance, so users can only guess.

The dynamic range expansion available in most shooting modes can be set to 200% (DR200) or 400% (DR400), where DR100 = no dynamic range expansion. The DR800 option combining both hardware and software dynamic range enhancement is only available in EXR Dynamic Range Priority mode, and it automatically selects a fixed ISO200. If you don't see DR800 available as an option at first, make sure you have selected Auto ISO, and the default Provia film type.

How well does dynamic range enhancement work? Well, as I mentioned earlier, the effects are generally modest. You can see comparison shots of the different DR levels in many online reviews. Under the right circumstances, you will see some minor improvement to the dynamic range of the image, particularly in the sky and in photos combining shadowed and sunlit areas. Don't expect it to fix blown-out highlights in bright sunlight. Even this modest improvement is welcome though, since I have personally found dynamic range to be a ever-increasing problem with my photos as sensor resolution has increased with each new generation of cameras. It's one of the main reasons I was interested in this camera.

The Low Noise/High-ISO mode of the EXR sensor does show a modest improvement in image noise compared to not using it. It's nothing spectacular, but I would use it when taking a low-light shot, unlike some other reviewers who said it doesn't have enough effect to be useful.

Even better for taking photos in low light though is the Pro Low Light mode. This mode takes 4 shots in rapid succession and then combines them to reduce noise. It works very well, making a big difference to the noise level. It's even able to handle some camera movement between frames, which is a good thing since it's impossible to hold the camera steady by hand for 4 shots. The big limitation is of course that it can't handle moving subjects, since in that case there is significant movement between frames, which produces multiple ghost images if people or objects move in the frame.

The ISO setting on the F70EXR can go up as high as 12800 (!), but only at the Small image size (2 megapixels), and of course it's mostly grainy noise when pushed that far. Fuji has also thoughtfully provided Auto 1600, Auto 800, and Auto 400 settings (auto up to the specified limit), which is very useful in controling the amount of noise you will get in images.

Image quality:

You can set the camera to capture 10 megapixel high-resolution images, but in most cases it does not produce significantly more detail than you get at 5 megapixels. That's partly due to the optical resolution of the lens, and partly due to the slightly different arrangement of pixels on the EXR sensor. Most experts recommend leaving the F70EXR in the 5 megapixel M mode to take advantage of dynamic range extension unless the light is really good enough to capture extra detail at high resolution. That's fine with me, since the long zoom lens allows me to frame photos better in the first place instead of having to crop down a bigger image.

The Auto color balance of the F70EXR is usually significantly too cool (blue) for my taste, similar to my earlier Fuji F20. By comparison I find Canon's auto color balance is a little bit on the warm side, but much closer to what the eye actually sees. I sometimes need to select the white balance manually for the Fuji if I don't want to fiddle with the color later. Many people prefer to use the Shadow or Flourescent-1 WB setting in daylight to warm things up.

The Auto exposure setting is usually fine, although it sometimes seems to overexpose a little in daylight (maybe 1/3 stop) to allow better dynamic range expansion. Flash exposure is usually acceptable at the wide angle end of the zoom range, but can be erratic at higher zoom levels. In more difficult situations it's not as good as my Canon cameras in spite of Fuji's so-called "Super Intelligent Flash". However the highest ISO settings allow a longer range for the small flash than most compact cameras.

There is a fair bit of image noise, as you might expect with the small sensor and reduced aperture forced by the long zoom lens. It's reasonably well controlled at low ISO levels, but don't use anything over ISO 400 if you want a good photo. At ISO 800 the image noise and the effects of noise reduction processing are already readily apparent even in well-lit areas of the image, and the results are not pretty in the shadow areas. The Canon cameras with similar sensor pixel densities suffer just as much image noise, but Fuji could learn a few lessons from Canon on noise reduction algorithms that implement a smooth trade-off between noise and detail.

Fuzzy image corners are a problem at the wide angle end of the zoom range, which is unfortunately the initial position when the camera turns on. I have also seen reports of fuzzy top edges with some units, although mine seems ok. In any case, I prefer to zoom in a little to avoid fuzzy corners rather than use the full wide angle if I don't need it. Some users prefer to shoot 3:2 aspect-ratio images instead of 4:3, discarding the image corners.

There's significantly more purple fringing in areas of high contrast than most recent cameras, but you generally only notice it in special cases (like tree branches against cloudy sky).

The image quality problems I encounter most often with the F70EXR in normal use are fuzzy image corners and bad noise reduction processing. I try to avoid situations which will produce those problems.

A few other items:

The F70EXR uses the NP50 lithium-ion battery. The capacity is adequate - enough for a few hundred shots, or a couple of days of active shooting and viewing. It is on the small side though, and the FX70EXR has the shortest battery life of any of my pocket cameras. The battery meter gives a reasonable amount of warning when the battery is running low.

The battery charger is dual voltage. It takes about 2.5 hours to fully charge the battery. It's a bit bulkier than the Canon charger. It uses a simple amber light on/off to indicate charging/complete, which is not quite as informative as Canon's amber/green light.

The USB cable has a proprietary compact connector at the camera end. It's a bit slow transferring images via USB, so I generally prefer to pop out the SD card and transfer the photos using a separate card reader instead.

The proprietary AV cable shares the same connector as USB, providing a standard composite video (NTSC or PAL selectable) and mono audio output at the other end.

Both cables are compatible with previous Fuji cameras.

Fuji includes only a very basic paper manual with the camera, but there's a more complete manual on CD, along with Fuji's standard Finepix software for digital cameras. In my opinion the manual is not great - it provides very little explanation of how the advanced features work and which options can be used together.

Bottom line:

This is a very interesting and versatile camera, but sometimes a bit frustrating to use. The photographic results can range from amazing to horrible, and unlike some other cameras you cannot rely on the auto settings to capture a good photo. You need to experiment with the entire range of settings to find out what the camera can do in different circumstances, and be prepared to make some adjustments. More often than not the F70EXR shot can also benefit from some computer post-processing, even if it's just to fix the color balance. It helps to read the advice of other expert F70EXR users on choosing the best settings among the many options and combinations, since they are far too numerous to explore thoroughly yourself.

If you want a compact camera with a wide zoom range, and you appreciate the advantages of the EXR sensor and are prepared to invest some effort in learning how to use it to get a good shot, this may be the camera for you. If you are expecting great results with point-and-shoot automatic operation, you may be disappointed.