LinkBack URL
About LinkBacks
After seeing the universally excellent reviews of the Fuji Finpix F200 EXR (some of which are shown on the Fuji website) I decided to buy one. When I received the camera I found that far from being the exceptional compact reviews had lead me to believe it was actually the worst digital camera I’d ever owned. It has the following major problems:
- Washed out colours and abysmal colour accuracy in all conditions
- High noise levels even in well it scenes
- Terrible auto-focus in low light
If you’ve read the reviews you might think I’m insane so I’ve uploaded some pictures to allow you to see these problems yourself.
Day Time Shots – Illustrates Poor Colours
I’ll start with the day time shots which illustrate the washed out colours and terrible colour recreation of the F200. For each scene I took a picture with the Fuji Finpix F200 EXR, a Panasonic DMC LX2 and a Fuji Finpix F11. The pictures have been scaled down to 1280x960 for faster downloading and easy viewing in a browser, but if you want to see the unscaled versions you can download them in a zip file from LX2 F200 F11
As you can see the F200 has drained the colour from this scene. You'll note in the LX2 picture the garden wall is shown as red (it's true colour) but in the F200 picture it is brown. The green trees have turned close to black and the whole scene looks as if there's a grey haze over it. Even the much older F11 does a far better job of representing the scene than the F200.
Outdoor Daytime 2: LX2 F200 F11
Again, the red brick of the house shown correctly on the LX2 has been turned to brown by the F200. The golden fence, again represented accurately by the LX2, turns to a shade of browney grey and the whole scene has had the colour taken away.
Outdoor Daytime 3: LX2 F200 F11
The pictures were taken on a very sunny day but as you can see the F200 makes it look dull. Pretty much any camera could so a good job of capturing this scene but the F200 failed rather badly.
Outdoor Daytime 4: LX2 F200 F11
Again the green of the bush and gold of the fence have been drained by the F200. The bright sunlight is also lost and the scene looks dull. Once again the F11 beats the F200 while the LX2 delivers a true representation of the scene.
Indoor Daytime: LX2 F200 F11
Things get no better indoor and the F200 continues to bleach the colour from scenes turning everything to shades of grey. The LX2 represents the sink and the colour of the floor pretty accurately but the colours of the F200 are totally inaccurate. The bright sunlight shining in through the window has also been lost on the F200.
I have never seen a camera which so poorly represents the colours of a scene and the pictures it produces are truely terrible. What's most shocking is that this is the F200 at its best and things get much worse at night and in low light.
Night Time Shots – Illustrates Terrible Auto-Focus and High Noise
For night scenes the benchmark is the F11 since the LX2 has rather poor low light performance (though it still far exceeds the F200).
Outdoor Night 1 (Stable with timer): F11 LX2 F200 Attempt 1 F200 Attempt 2
These pictures were taken with the camera placed on a stable surface (a wheelie bin) and the timer was used so that the camera was stable when the picture was taken. As you can see the F11 delivers great pictures in low light while the LX2 delivers something passable. The F200 on the other hand was unable to focus on the scene and produced a blurred mess. For all other photos I had used the first picture but the F200 picture was so bad I thought I best take it again. Even with a second attempt it still failed to deliver a usable picture and the atuo-focus seemed completely unable to focus on this night time scene.
Outdoor Night 2 (Stable with timer in night scenery mode): F11 LX2 F200 Attempt 1 F200 Attempt 2 F200 Attempt 3
This was taken in the same way as the first night photo but in Night Scenery mode. The F11 again delivers a quality picture (though it looks like I knocked the camera leading to a double exposure) and the LX2 picture is very pleasing though the very long exposure makes it look a bit unnatural. The F200 was once again totally unable to focus on this night scene and with three attempts could not deliver a single usable picture.
Outdoor Night 3 (Holding the camera): F11 LX2 F200 F200 F200
I took the same picture again but this time holding the camera so it was less stable, but the F11 still produced a reasonable picture and the LX2 is passable. For the previous two pictures I was using the timer facility but now that I was holding the camera I could have multiple attempts at getting it to focus prior to taking the picture. While the other two cameras focused first time on the scene I couldn't get the F200 to focus at all even with multiple attempts. After about five trys I gave up and just took blurred pictures since it seems that's all the F200 can manage. In what can only be described as a rare freak the F200 actually managed to focus in the third picture. This third picture (the first night time shot the F200 has got in focus) reveals yet another major flaw with the F200 - extremely high levels of noise. The F200 has far more noise in the picture than the LX2 despite the fact that Panasonic cameras are often criticised for the levels of noise. High noise levels are a major problem with the F200 and I'll be showing more illustrations of this later.
Indoor Night: F11 LX2 F200
In this indoor shot the F200 again shows extremely high levels of noise compared to the other two cameras. The colours are also very dull compared to the LX2 showing that the draining of colour also occurs in low light.
More Illustrations of High Noise
Since most of the F200 night time shots were out of focus I've taken a few more pictures to illustrate the high levels of noise it produces even in well lit scenes. I used the mode which takes two pictures, one with the flash disabled and a second with the flash on:
High Noise 1: No Flash With Flash
As you can see from the window it was still light and the room was fairly well lit but despite this the F200 produced two utterly abysmal pictures with high levels of noise even with the flash on. The noise on the television screen is the most obvious but if you look at the table on the right and the stand you can see that the whole picture is covered with noise even with the flash on.
High Noise 2: No Flash With Flash
In this picture you can see there are four lights on the ceiling, the main room light was on and there was light coming through the window. Despite the abundance of light the F200 again produced pictures with a great deal of noise. When I looked at the picture properties I noticed the camera had selected ISO-1600 which seems ridiculous given how bright the scene was. Looking at other pictures I found that it seems to select ISO-1600 for most scenes regardless of how well they're lit. This explains why most of the F200 pictures have such high levels of noise.
High Noise 3: No Flash With Flash
This was taken in the same room as the above with the four lights still on and the window illuminating from behind. While the picture with the flash was reasonable the one without the flash has a great deal of noise again probably because it selected ISO-1600.
High Noise 4: No Flash With Flash
In this room the F200 actually selected ISO-800 but despite this the picture with the flash off still contains high levels of noise.
I wasn't going to bother with comparisons for these pictures but I was so appalled by the F200 pictures that I started to wonder with the LX2 would be like under the conditions. I just did one quick comparison, taking pictures with the F200 and LX2 at the same time both with and without the flash:
With Flash: F200 LX2
In the F200 picture look at the noise on the television screen, on the glass stand, and on the bottom shelf of the table next to the television. Moving on to the LX2 you'll see an image that's largely free of noise. The F200 again shows its usual bleaching of colours in addition to the high noise levels. With vastly lower noise levels and far better colours the 3 year old LX2 easily beats the F200.
No Flash: F200 LX2
Without the flash neither picture is exactly great. The F200 picture is slightly sharper but is completely ruined by the noise. The LX2 delivers an accurate representation of the scene though it's a little bit blurry. The LX2 has much more pleasant noise, similar to film grain, while the F200 has purple and green dots all over the place which totally ruin the picture. In my opinion the LX2 is the clear winner here.
Intelligent Flash
Terrible colours, high noise and useless auto-focus aren't tools the F200 has for destroying your photographs and Fuji has also added an "Intelligent Flash". This reduces the area covered by the flash so that part of your picture comes out in total darkness.
Intelligent Flash
The "Intelligent Flash" activated a number of times while I was messing around with the camera and every picture was the same - a large black area. I initially thought I had accidentally covered part of the flash with my finger but when I looked I found that my fingers were nowhere near the flash and I then realised that it was the "Intelligent Flash". I'm not sure how illuminating only part of the scene constitutes intelligence but what it definately does is force you to retake the picture every time it activates. You'll also note that this picture again shows the F200's trademark high noise levels.
Fuji's Response
After reading the positive reviews and then seeing the abysmal pictures my F200 produced I was left wondering if my camera was defective. I sent an email to Fuji with the same comments and pictures as the above post and at the end asked if my camera was defective or if the F200 really was that bad. I received a one line response from Fuji asking me to send the original unscaled versions of the pictures. The originals were around 4.5MB each which meant there was about 150MB of photos but I uploaded them individually and sent Fuji the links. After having me waste my time uploading the unscaled pictures they never even bothered to reply to me. Maybe they were hoping the unscaled pictures would look better and didn't know what to say when they actually looked worse (the noise is more visible before scaling them down). Maybe their customer services is just terrible and they couldn't be bothered responding. Either way they were of absolutely no help.
Conclusion
I'm not a photography enthusiast and somebody with more more knowledge may be able to get better pictures out of the F200 by using the manual settings. However, the fact still remains that under the same conditions the F11 and LX2 delivered vastly better pictures than the F200 proving that the camera is significantly inferior to cameras I bought a few years ago. I can get good pictures out of the F11 and LX2 but I can't get anything remotely decent out the F200. The colours in day time pictures are washed out and totally inaccurate, at night the camera can't seem to focus at all and in low light it produces pictures with levels of noise like I've never seen. I'm going to continue using the LX2 and F11 since they produce better pictures and I can't imagine ever using the F200 so it was a total waste of money. The camera simply has no redeeming features and I can't imagine how it got such good reviews (inducements from Fuji perhaps?).
If I had tried the F200 before buying it I most certainly would not have purchased one since it is without doubt the worst digital camera I've ever owned. Unfortunately I bought it based purely on the reviews and I'm now stuck it since Amazon won't accept returns of cameras after they've been taken out of the box. Based on my experience I would suggest avoiding the F200 like the plague but if you're still interested in buying one I strongly suggest you find a shop where you can try it out before committing to a purchase. You may also wish to try the Panasonic TZ9 and LX3 and compare them to the F200 since my personal experience is that Panasonic produce far better cameras than Fuji and I regret not getting an LX3 instead of an F200.
Comments?
I would be interested in hearing from more knowledgeable photographers what they think of these pictures. How is the camera getting such good reviews when the colour recreation is so bad? Why was it unable to focus at night? Why is there so much noise in the pictures? What's going on with the Intelligent Flash? Why is it so much worse than my older cameras? Do you think my F200 is broken or is it really this bad? I'd be interested in hearing comments on any of these subjects.
EDIT: Removed links to pictures on the TrustedReviews.com website after it was pointed out to me that the lights were on in one picture and off in the other hence the comparison was invalid.
Reply With Quote
