Photography by Mike Mander - 2008 / Fuji S100fs

Here are the first photos with my new Fuji FinePix S100fs camera. The highlight of this camera is a truly superb lens (28-400mm equivalent), probably the best overall I've ever seen in a point & shoot digital. You can see how incredibly flare resistant it is on a couple of shots that were taken right into the sun at full wide-angle zoom. Sharpness is very good, pretty much edge-to-edge, with only some chromatic abberration (CA) and a relatively minor amount of barrel distortion at full wide-angle, marring what would almost be a perfect lens otherwise. These photos were all shot RAW and processed in Adobe Lightroom with its effective lens corrections, so CA is essentially nonexistent on these images. When shooting JPEGs with this camera however, CA could indeed be an issue on some shots. The dynamic range of this sensor is also the best I've seen in a P&S so far and noise levels, while not up to the standards of modern digital SLRs, are still commendable. The camera boasts very good image quality up to ISO 400 and even ISO 800 is useable (with relatively "film-like" noise below 1600) - not something one could say about almost any other P&S these days. Lastly, the camera's matrix metering is incredibly accurate and I rarely found that I had to dial in any exposure compensation to avoid clipping highlights or shadows - maybe the most accurate metering I've ever seen in any camera actually! While the camera is not without its minor annoyances, I am overall extremely impressed with its handling an image quality...