Fujifilm FinePix E900

Reviewed January 2006

Image Quality

Attractively finished, and equipped with an impressive 9-megapixel resolution, a 4X optical zoom and a well-rounded array of shooting modes, the FinePix E900 is designed to find a place near the top of anyone's list of potential candidates.

Moreover, as do a number of other current Fujifilm cameras, the E900 provides a RAW mode in addition to its JPEG image format, making it possible to get the best image quality possible from its Super CCD sensor.

Indeed, the E900's 9-megapixel image size makes it possible to print images out to a large 8 x 10 inch size (25 x 20 cm) size — actually 10 x 7.5 inch (25 x 19 cm) because of the 4:3 proportions of the Super CCD — and have prints that are sharp and detailed, and at 348 dpi.

But while the FinePix E900 is able to produce excellent large prints from JPEG, when these images are seen at 100% on a monitor, their sharpness and detail is a bit disappointing. JPEG compression is a "lossy" process that eliminates colour information from the image to reduce the image's file size. But the disadvantage of the process is that when the compression is aggressive, the images loose detail and sharpness, while artefacts such as fuzzy edges appear.

Set to its best JPEG image quality, 9M Fine, the FinePix E900 compresses with a ratio that is at best 6:1 and which can increase from there depending on the content of the image. At that level of compression, images looked at full scale on a monitor, are noticeably less sharp and detailed than RAW images.

This highlights one of the drawbacks of the E900: it offers no significant choice to the user when it comes to compression, and the only alternative is to use the RAW format.

The RAW format captures images with file sizes that hover around 18.5 MB, better and more practical than an uncompressed TIFF format would be at over 27 MB per image. Still, the camera needs approximately 10 seconds to save the image, and requires the acquisition of another card than the 16MB included with the camera.

But, while the E900 can capture RAW images, the software Fujifilm includes with the camera is only able to convert it to a more common format. And only users with either Photoshop, or another image editor with the ability to open the E900's .RAF extension files and process them, will get full benefit from the format.

The RAW format produces 9-megapixel images that contain much more detail than the JPEG version the camera produces. And only when these are inspected closely does the cost on image sharpness extracted by the Fine mode become clear.

Equipped with 3 metering modes, the E900's primary metering mode, and the default, is called Multi which divides the frame into 64 segments, evaluates each, and then performs "scene recognition" to determine the best overall camera settings to capture the image.

More often than not, the Multi metering yields an image that is perfectly well exposed. Still, when the frame contains large variations in brightness, images can loose detail in the highlights before loosing detail in the shadows, and care should exercised when photographing subjects that contain wide variations in brightness, as with such subjects the Average pattern is more effective.

While the E900 's images contain some noise at all ISO levels, noise is much less noticeable at lower resolutions. In fact, with the E900 noise increases as the resolution increases while a 2-megapixel 800 ISO photo is quite useable, at 9 megapixel, the noise is too distracting.

Nevertheless, using the 9 megapixel image size, noise is reasonable at 80 and even up to 100 ISO, only becoming easily detectable at 200 ISO as "grain". And, as noted above, is omnipresent at 400 and 800 ISO.

Nevertheless, the FinePix E900 inherits one of the characteristics of other Fujifilm cameras: a superb ability to reproduce colours faithfully.

In many respects the FinePix E900 is fast: it starts quickly, stops quickly, and has no noticeable shutter lag. However, it can also take a photo before the autofocus system has had a chance to do its job. So some care has to be exercised when using the camera until its hair-trigger shutter release becomes familiar.

Optically, the images show a chromatic aberration with high contrasts when the zoom is at the wide angle end and with the bigger apertures. But the aberration evaporates once the zoom is past the widest angle, or with smaller apertures.

Similarly, a bit of barrel distortion that can be seen occasionally with wide angle shots, but it too disappears once the zoom moves past the wide angle. And with the camera tested here, with wide angle shots, a loss of sharpness could be detected in the extreme corners of the frame.

The E900 turned out to be less predictable than we had expected. Its RAW format clearly shows a very high image quality, but its best JPEG format — in our opinion — uses too strong a compression. Yet, when JPEG (9M Fine) images are printed out, the prints turn out to be sufficiently detailed as to make everyone happy, and exhibit perfect colours. Similarly, while noise is visible at all sensitivities when the image is inspected on a monitor, when an 80, or even a 100 ISO photo is printed to an 8 x 10 size it shows no trace of it.

Therefore, if good quality prints are most important, the E900 should fit the bill.