Fuji S5 Pro

I'm considering purchasing a Fuji S5 Pro to use for fashion & portrature. I already own a medium format

digital system but need something in addition to it that's faster. I'd like to hear from people who've used

the S5 & how they feel about the quality of this camera. I currently use a Nikon D80 for 35mm.

There's this review of it. Maybe you've seen it already.

 

http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/FujifilmS5Pro/

I just read a few test reports while at Barnes an Nobles in this months magazines. They were very positive on the camera. Here is a photonet post with user samples that should be helpful.

 

http://www.photo.net/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=00LkpZ

 

Edward, has played with the camera quite a bit and his samples look good to me. I think from the reviews and samples I have seen on the Fuji forum on dpreview that for fashion and portrature this is one of the best cameras you could choose. Also look at the photonet wedding and event forum many wedding pros are already using this camera and you can ask them to comment.

I own it. I use it. I love it. I'm an S5 bigot. But if you already own an MF digital and are doing mostly studio work I'm not sure how much it will do for you. For portraiture the S5's biggest claim to fame is it's excellent skin tones (since it doesn't burn out the tiny specular highlights that skin contains). But most of the MF sensors are supposed to have the latitude to do that too.

 

If you're going out of the studio, however, get it! You'll get skin tones that won't look flat and unnaturally smooth, which means they won't be overpowered when seen side by side with the MFs. And you'll get the Nikon CLS lighting system, which works very well for quick remote multi-light setups. Quantum now makes CLS slave units for the Qflash in case you need a little more power. I have one that's attached to a medium softbox to act as a main light.

 

Just curious what your MF camera/lens/digital-back is. I've been thinking about getting a back for my Hassy but the Fuji works well enough for my purposes.

 

If you simply want a DSLR then get the S5. For fashion tt's probably the only one you'll be happy with.

 

Remember of course that you'll need a good lens. For fashion that probably means the Nikon 85mm 1.4 plus the 50 1.4 for full body. If manual focus is good for you, get the 50 1.2 mf, my favorite Nikon lens. Great Bokeh.

Thanks Al, Harvey & Edward. I love my MF Digital but it's incredibly slow for fasion. It takes

up to 11 seconds to write one file to the CF card! I use Mamiya (AFD II & a ZD back) but I'm

seriously considering going back to 35mm only. The files are huge, the camera is heavy &

slow. I get great images but I get great images with my D80 too. Sometimes I can't tell the

difference. If I do this I'll buy some good Nikon lenses.

what about the Canon 5D or even 1Ds MkII?

I'm an S5 user. It's difficult to explain this camera, but I'll try.<p>

 

For starters, I think you can summarize the camera by saying it was designed for wedding and portrait folks. This means it produces surprisingly good jpegs out of the camera, it's great with skin tones, auto white balance and the out of camera colors are amazing (remember - the goal is "good looking people" rather than "scientifically correct depiction of lighting conditions"), the files are reminiscent of Portra/NPH rather than something punchier, noise performance at high "film" speed is very good, and its dynamic range is unmatched. Build quality is great.<p>

 

With all that said, it's only a 6 megapixel camera. From what I've seen that means it resolves about as well as 100 ASA 35mm film (and better at higher speeds) but that's at the bottom of the range for modern DSLRs. This might not matter to you (it doesn't to me), but it seems to be the biggest criticism of the camera.<p>

 

RAW files are also fairly huge in the extended dynamic-range mode, so it's good that the jpegs are so good. Here's an example of a jpeg I shot this weekend while hanging out beside the pool. It was a couple of minutes before 2 pm, the background was full sun, and my wife was sitting in the shade of a canvas umbrella. The camera was set on aperture priority matrix metering so I could get a feeling for how the camera would perform without any help from me.<p>

 

Here's the jpeg straight out of the camera viewed in Lightroom - you can see that there are a few areas on the outside of the pool where the red channel is blowing out; the rest of the image was contained. <p>

 

<img src="http://www.derekzeanah.com/images/dwf/LR-highlights.jpg"><p>

 

Now, here's the same image with a little bit of fill light in Lightroom. Lots of people shoot RAW to give themselves a bit of insurance, but from what I've seen shooting RAW + jpeg for the most part you don't need it with this camera.<p>

 

<img src="http://www.derekzeanah.com/images/dwf/LR-fill-light.jpg"><p>

 

It's not a great image, but it might tell you something about how this camera performs outdoors in icky lighting. Especially when shooting jpegs.<p>

 

It offers some film modes as well -- I shot a bit less than 40 images to try and decide which film modes worked best for me. Turns out F1 renders skin and tones closest to how I remember them, so that's what I went with. Here's one of the comparisons I put together (still icky midday lighting, full sun, no fill, camera on aperture mode with matrix priority metering:<p>

 

<img src="http://www.derekzeanah.com/images/dwf/S5-Comparison-One.jpg"><p>

 

Again, far from a masterpiece but gives you a feel for that 12 stops of dynamic range that DPReview saw, and might tell you something about the "film modes." I'm not sure how much these actually matter - one wedding photographer I respect shoots STD + 400% dynamic range all the time, a few others shoot F1b, others F1a, some F1c (which I simply thought was icky), etc. Use it if it helps; lay off it otherwise.<p>

 

Overall I'd say there's little to be critical of. Colors and especially skin tones look great with little to no work. Dynamic range is there if you care to use it (and if not, then why buy the camera?) High ISO noise is beautiful if you're comparing it to 35mm film. The iTTL flash works well - bounce it off a colored wall and the camera will still try to get the colors right for you (assuming AWB). AWB is surprisingly good for people photography, which is great news because the WB presets apparently suck otherwise. The camera is fast focusing and well-built -- it's even mostly moisture proof with an adequate number of weather seals. <p>

 

To my mind, it's the camera of choice if you photograph people and are looking to use the Nikon mount.<p>

 

With all that said, there are hordes of photographers who prefer the Canon 5D so much they switched systems for it. It's probably worth considering as well.<p>

 

I hope this helped. If you've got more questions, please feel free to ask.

Follow-up. That's the first time I've used the word "icky" so many times in a post. Must be in an icky mood...

 

Anyway, check out Ken Rockwell's review of the camera. He didn't particularly like it, but if you read all of the subsections you get a pretty good feel for what it is/isn't good at.

Thanks, Derek. The fact that it's only six megapixels is a deal-breaker for me. Fuji falsely

advertises it as 12 megapixels. I think I'll take another look at Canon. I've got to have a least

12 Megapixels for the type of prints I sell.

<i>Fuji falsely advertises it as 12 megapixels</i><p>

 

I don't think so, but it sure looks that way. ;) <p>

 

The camera actually has 12 million pixels; it's just that it's configured as 6 megapixels for shadows and medium tones, and 6 more for highlight detail. So you get a 6 megapixel image with more tonal depth, rather than an image with 12 million pixels ( height X width ) that you'd expect.<p>

 

Mix that with Fuji's SuperCCD layout that requires interpolating up to 12 megapixels to account for the funky pixel layout before dropping back down to the "real" 6 megapixels, with the option to save these "large" jpegs that only offer a touch more detail than the "medium" 6 megapixel jpegs, and it's misleading.<p>

 

I'm glad we got this limitation out of the way before you got the camera and fell in love with the colors. ;)

I haven't experimented with it, but I've heard the the 12mp jpgs it can produce are more than just blown up 6mps. Apparently it takes into account the hexagonal layout of the double-sensor configuration and uses that to squeeze out more info. I shall investigate.

 

By the way, does anyone else have a problem with DPReview's 12 stop range claim? That would make it better than b&w film! I've measured it's range with my trusty lightmeter and the pixel info in lightroom, and I get 6 1/2 stops, which is pretty good since 35mm film has 7 (at least that's what they taught me in photo school) and the D200 only 4 1/2. Has anyone read deep enough into the review to see what they were doing wrong?

Isn't where you cut off shadow detail because it's overwhelmed by noise key to how many "stops" a digital camera has?

 

Here's the DPReview Dynamic range page FYI

http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/fujifilms5pro/page18.asp

Yes. The dynamic range in stops runs from the point where the shadows either go to 0,0,0 or are overwhelmed by noise up to the point where the whites get at least one 255 in their value (in other words higher info is lost). It's easy to test. Take a scene with a wide range of lighting, meter spot meter various sections until you have a good range, take your picture, then check the pixel values for those 0,0,0s and 255,x,x to see what stops they correspond to. This is a very standard test. In film you look for the places where no amount of development will bring out shadow or highlight details.

 

I've done this on my Fuji. Get 6 1/2 stops. Color film gets 7 stops. Kodak Tri-X supposedly gets around 10. If DPReview is right then the Fuji has more latitude than Tri-X! That is so obviously not right that I wonder why there is any debate on the point.

 

For those who are curious, Canon gets 5 stops, which is better than Nikon.

 

And the reason that skin looks better with more stops of latitude is that there are always small oily elements to skin that produce glare. Without the latitude you can't tame it at all.

"Dynamic range in stops runs from the point where the shadows either go to 0,0,0 or are overwhelmed by noise"

How are you quantifying this- it could be done in a number of ways.

 

I doubt you'd ever get usable info all the way down to 0,0,0 so that might not be a reasonable benchmark.

Several of the tests I have seen a couple of months ago and some of the test in this months photo magazines give the resolution results that are in line with what Dpreview.com came up with. The resolution tables in Dpreview show the camera resolving about the same as cameras that have sensors with 8-9 megapixels. The difference between that and a 10 megapixel camera is statistically small and will only marginally increase the blow up size of the max print size just a little.

 

Look at the pnet Wedding and social events forum you will read pro wedding photographer who are really happy with the size, resolution, color and dynamic range in their work.

 

I too hope that Fuji will get a larger sensor next time, but the S5 is getting excellent reviews in the trade magazines and from pros who use it and that it is based on the Nikon d200 is a solid product.

I really appreciate everyone taking time to respond to this post. I would really love to have

this camera IF it were 12 MP's or higher. I'm kind of known for my large (24X36 or larger)

prints. Does anyone think I could make enlargements this big with the S5? I love the skin

tones & dynamic range in the S5 but that alone wouldn't really be worth it to me. Despite the

fact that I shoot most of my stuff with MF digital & really need something faster for fashion

shoots. Anyone have any reccomendations?

Just thought I'd submit this link:

 

http://www.amazon.com/Fujifilm-Finepix-S5-Megapixels-Interchangeable/dp/

B000NWDL9W/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/102-5605215-7311322?

ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1184290501&sr=8-1

 

As you can see, Amazon.com is advertising it as a 12.3 Megapixel camera.

Hello Skyy

 

I use the S5 since 3-4 months now. I can deliver to you my first impressions. I used a D200 just before : the body is just perfect, but as a landscape photographer I was angry about burning highlights too easyly (even with underexposure -1IL...), on the other hand I was really surprised by sharpness (maybe too much, which sometimes makes shots not as natural as we expect!

 

The S5, for me gives just opposite results : perfect handling of low/highlights-dynamic-, which is what I expected from this DSLR, but soft sharpness results (JPEG or RAW), sharpness need to be enhanced in postprocessing, which clearly remind the user that it's only a 6 Mpix DSLR!

Perfect colors rendition in direct JPEG, no real need to shoot in RAW (files far too big : 25 Mo! Fuji Hyper Utility software not friendly to use, very far from the "turbo" Nikon Capture !).

 

The extremely good performance of the S5 is the very low noise even at 1600 ISO...if it's usefull to you...(shooting in low lights with no flash etc...)

 

The extremely bad performance of the S5 is it's low response time, the 3 shots per second is just possible in JPEG with NO wide dynamic...very dispointing when you want try some sports shots or even fashion shots in movement...compared to the S5, the D200 is a killer on this point.

 

Considering your purposes, S5 is a good choice for portraiture, maybe not for fashion (moving models...). Considering large prints is not a problem is you don't expect extreme sharpness, here perfect noise handling is a significant asset.

 

Conclusion is that the perfect DSLR is hard to find (maybe the new Canon 1D MK III...not my budget unfortunately...!)

 

All the best

 

JP

I have the S5 for 6 months and the weddings I have shot are Outstanding. The colors are super right out of the camera. I recommend it very highly. Use good Nikon Glass and youre set, rollsman