New Camera: Fuji Finepix HS10

A few months ago I got my son a new Fuji camera with an 18X lens that was longer than my Canon Powershot's. Falling behind in the camera arms race was a traumatic experience for me that required much consumption of alcohol to cope with. Fortunately my lovely wife took pity on me in my wretchedness and bought me a new Fuji Finepix HS10 last night. It is easy to understand why I married this woman.

We picked up the camera for $15,900 at one of the shops in NOVA in Taichung. I'd been thinking about a Canon Powershot SX10 IS for a while since my Powershot is slowly falling apart but the zoom wasn't quite big enough for me to go out and pick up a new camera, among other issues. Not when there was bike stuff to buy! But as soon as I wrapped my hands around that Fuji's big lens I was in love.

As you can see in the pic above, the HS10 sports a huge 24-720mm optical zoom (30x), which appears to be the same lens the NSA uses to read license plates from orbit. Two shots are here -- the street at 24mm and then racked out to 720mm in the inset. The man's head and lettering in the lower section are behind the truck on the left center of the main photo. You can sorta see him there as a gray-blue blob.

Here's two shots again of the same street, the main shot wide angle (24mm). The red box is the place displayed in the inset at longest zoom. Note that the zoom racks out manually -- gives you much better control and saves battery power.

Here's a shot from a road near my house in Tanzi, north of Taichung on wide angle (24mm). Factoid: thanks to a quirk in the configuration of the river basins between here and Wufeng, on a clear day you can see Nantou from this tiny rise even though we are something like 15K from Wufeng. Good luck getting a clear day, though. Note the highway construction in the center distance....

Same highway construction, 720mm zoom.

One of things that delighted me about the first Fuji I owned, an S5000, was the excellent macro capabilities. My current Canon S5 IS also takes great macro shots. Here is a carrot at super macro with the new Fuji.

Cilantro on super macro. I think I'm going to have a lot of fun with this camera.

The camera shoots in RAW and in a variety of image sizes. ISO ranges from 100-6400, and Fuji's high ISO processing appears to have less noise than the Canon's. The macro is easier to use than the Canon's, but the other functions are often less efficiently arranged -- the Powershot's functions are all easily accessible, one of the things I really love about that camera. The Fuji powers up instantly when you turn it on so it is ready when you are. A nifty feature is that when you bring it up to your eye to peer through the viewfinder, it senses the closeness of your face and automatically switches from the LCD to the viewfinder. Overall image sharpness and quality seems excellent but my impression at present is that it is slightly inferior to the Canon Powershot's when you zoom into a photo, a consequence of Fuji's JPG compression routines, I think. In any case shooting on RAW addresses that problem (on RAW my 16G SD card takes about 1000 pictures).
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