Living Life Media

Fuji FinePix F20 Review

My first SLR camera was a Canon Elan which I purchased in 1993 when I took my first photography class. It was a super nice camera that I bought for around $500 if I remember correctly. Of course, I couldn’t afford high quality lenses at the time or the cost of developing lots and lots of film so I didn’t get to experiment and learn all the features. I usually took the pictures in P (program mode) and it seemed to do fine. I sold it a couple of years ago for around $120 at a camera shop. They were only going to pay me $60 for it, but I asked for more in the form of store credit and they obliged.

My next major camera purchase was a digital point and shoot for around $500 again. It was a Kodak DC280 which offered 2 megapixel resolution and at the time came highly recommended. I bought it in 1999 and I still own it today, but it feels like a brick toy now.

I’ve purchased other point and shoot cameras through the years that were okay, but not too memorable. My favorite point and shoot digital camera before I jumped into digital SLR cameras was the Olympus C8080 Wide Zoom. It offered some amazing image quality for a point and shoot and I learned to be creative with that camera.

After being so happy with the Olympus C8080 it was natural for me to want to stay with Olympus in the dSLR world. I guess I should have done my research first. I tried the Olympus E-1 and E-500 dSLR cameras and they were fine for everyday shooting, but they were not the best for weddings. Slow auto focus and bad high iso performance were two of the problems. I didn’t figure that out until I spent $800 for one lens and $2300 for another lens. When I tried to resell the Olympus gear at Glazer’s camera in Seattle, they didn’t even want it. No offer at all! I took a pretty good beating and sold it all to some Olympus fans on a Olympus forum I found. I lost so much money with the Olympus gear that I told myself I would buy the best next time.

After much research into what wedding photographers use for cameras, I realized Nikon and Canon were the only choices. In the end, I chose the Canon 5D as my main camera. It is a full frame dSLR camera and I love it. I haven’t once regretted paying around $3000 for this camera. We also own a Canon 30D which is okay, but I let my Rebekah use that.

I’ve said all that to get to the reason I am writing this post. I haven’t owned a point and shoot digital camera since selling the Olympus C8080 and I really wanted a small point and shoot camera so I can take snap shots where ever I went. It is not cool taking your $3000 camera and $1500 lens with you all over the place for casual pictures. I looked at the usual p/s cameras that are in the market place. There are a ton out there with megapixel resolutions rivaling dSLR cameras. The problem with most of these from all manufacturers such as Canon, Nikon, Olympus, Sony, etc is they take lousy high iso natural light pictures. The one exception I found was the point and shoot line from Fuji. The Fuji F20, F30 and F31fd are awesome little cameras that have the perfect resolution (6.3 megapixels) and perform remarkably well for being what they are. They don’t rival or even come close to my Canon 5D for high iso pictures, but they do allow you to take natural light pictures that would print fine at 4×6. It is also really great to be able to take the camera where ever we go and not worry about losing the equipment that puts food on our table.

The picture above was taken with the Fuji F20 in night time scenic mode. I set it on a flat surface, set it to 2 sec delay shutter and the camera took the picture. I adjusted the curve slightly in photoshop, but if you want to see what the original high resolution picture looked like CLICK HERE. If you use the picture somewhere please be sure to credit the picture to me and my $150 dollar point and shoot Fuji F20.

Picture of a painting inside Vivace Coffeshop in Seattle. This picture was taken hand held at ISO 2000, f/2.8 using natural light. If you look at the full resolution image, there are definitely a lot of smearing noise artifacts, but I’m sure any other p/s camera from any other manufacturer wouldnt be able to stand up to the high iso images from my little Fuji.

Another high iso image of my wife enjoying Vivace coffee.

Another iso2000 image of Vivace coffee. You can definitely see the noise in this one.

Here are some pictures I took of the Fuji F20 using my Canon 5D at 1600iso.

Some other things I really like about the Fuji F20 are it’s movie mode, build quality and small size. The movie mode is important to me and it provides 640×480 resolution at 30 frames per second until the memory card fills up. Speaking of memory cards, that would be Fuji’s only negative. It uses xD cards and it sucks. I have found it to be slower than CF or SD cards and slightly more expensive. The new Fuji F40fd uses SD cards, but the F40 is a 8 megapixel camera compared to the F20, 30 and 31fd’s 6 megapixels. I returned the F40fd because for more money than the F20 it offered worse high iso images. If natural light shooting is not too important to you, the F40 is a very nice point and shoot camera offering 8 megapixels and a nice lcd screen.

By the way, I purchased the camera through B & H Photo/Video. They’ve always been good.

Copyright Todd H Kim Photography | Living Life Media

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This entry was posted on Friday, May 18th, 2007 at 12:56 pm and is filed under Shopping Related, Todds Toys. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.