F30/f50/e900/raw

hi everyone



im almost certain im gonna get a fuji f30 and housing next week some time

im just worried that the f50 might be a better camera, is it??

there is also the e900 that has raw but as far as i know neither the f30 or the f50 have raw so would it be best to go for e900 instead

does raw make a big differance to the final image, or is it just a way that the camera stores the image so when i put the image on my computer i have more scope to mess around with it, or am i completly wrong about raw haha

thanks

A lot of divers have done nice stuff with the e900. About a year ago there were quite a few threads here. You might find something in the related threads stuff on the bottom of this thread. The f30, f31fd and f50 don't support RAW. On the other hand, you can find about a thousand pages of stressed out Fuji shooters on Google complaining that they can't open Fuji .RAF files in their converters. RAW is simply a larger file that includes all the information taken in by the lens and transferred to the sensor. Your camera has programs built in to pre-edit your pictures based on the settings you use and discard extraneous information. The distilled and compressed information is stored in JPEG format. A raw file is about 10 times as large and only edited by your shutter and aperture settings. If you take a crappy picture, poorly lit, or with poor color balance based on your white balance settings and the available light you shot in, it's very difficult to fix in JPEG format. Because less of the info is there, when you take out the darks and colors you don't want, holes are left in the picture and it ends up grainy looking and with odd color tints in places. If you are a great photographer, and you set your camera perfectly, you'll have great JPEGs. If you screw up, RAW pics are a lot easier to make better and fine tune. Some cameras have very nice auto settings and allow manual adjustments that will let them adapt to underwater use. Others, not so much. On the plus side, the Fuji f30,f31fd, and f50 have a great reputation for lack of noise at higher ISO settings. This can help with lack of light underwater. Best thing to do is compare notes and look at the pictures of others who use these cameras in the manner you are planning.

thanks larry

the cheap camera i have at the moment managed to take one or 2 nice pictures, so i would imagine that if i had the f30 i would get some nice pictures too even if i had to delete 90 out of 100

im sure i will get to learn a little bit about taking pictures over time with the f30 so i think ive made my decision haha

i guess in the future i could get a strobe or maybe even up grade if im not getting anywhere with it, a lot of people have said its a good camera and some of the pictures ive seen from it are really nice too
thanks again

Here are my thoughts about the F30 and F31fd:

Great battery life. This is the single greatest feature.
Good ISO performance. Not a DSLR, but ISO 400 looks great.
Pretty responsive
Many photos topside have a pinkish tint. I do a lot of manual white balance.
Excellent choice for using Magic Filters. M A G I C - F I L T E R S
No flash exposure compensation. Not a deal breaker, but my Oly SP-310 and most Canons have it.

The F50 was released so Fuji could "keep up with the Jones." The 12MP sensor has a marginal improvement of resolution at ISO 100. Beyond that, the F30/F31 offer better image quality. I do like that the F50 takes SD cards. But you'll need the faster SD because the files are larger. Also, the battery on the F50 doesn't pack much punch.

Fuji is about to release the F100fd. It should offer improved image processing over the F50fd, but still won't have RAW. It has a slightly wider lens, which will be useful on land. Fuji's underwater housing is a no-go. It's got a rectangular port.

The E900 is a decent camera. Be advised that it lacks an AF assist light. That won't matter underwater. However if you're at a party and want to take photographs in a dark room, forget it. Just as Larry says, Fuji's RAW files have issues. Maybe the latest Adobe Camera RAW takes care of that, I'm not sure.

My own advice is to purchase a Canon A570is. They're selling for as little as $150. It's got full manual controls, a good Canon housing that can take w/a lenses, and lots of flash control. 7MP is plenty and don't get suckered into thinking that more pixels equals better.

I can only speak for the E900. I've owned one for 1 1/2 years, and have done a couple of week long carribean dive trips with it. I don't own an external strobe (yet) and have only used the on-camera flash.

I find shooting RAW to be very beneficial. My first couple of dives with a camera I shot jpg and was not happy with my ability to adjust the white balance in photoshop afterwards. Macro shots taken with the on-camera flash were fine, but anything very far away did not come out very good. I have since shot RAW on every dive.

Probably the main down side to RAW is the write time for Point-n-Shoot cameras. My E900 takes 6 seconds to write the 18MB file, and then the flash recycle time is on top of that too if you are using flash which makes it around 10 seconds between shots. I don't think it's ideal, but for me its worth it for the post-processing adjustablitity. If all you shoot are macro shots that the flash can light adequately, then JPG would be just fine.

The next major down side to RAW is that every image that you want to keep will have to be converted to some other image form. A blurry jpg or RAW is the same thou, you just delete them. I personally like doing the editing, and find that it doesn't take that long once you figure out what you need to adjust. Some people hate it thou, and for them I wouldn't suggest bothering with RAW.

The large file sizes will limit the number of images you can fit on a card. A 1GB xD card will hold 54 RAW files, and the 2GB xD can hold 108 images. This is fine for me for 2 dives. The longer write times make you be a little more carefull with your first shot and doesn't really allow you to take a bunch of shots of a fast moving fish.

I'm not sure what RAW problems Larry C and DesertEagle are talking about. I use Adobe Camera Raw and it works just fine. I've also used S7Raw and some other programs based on DCRaw and all work just fine. I have looked into Bibble and another program whose name escapes me and they didn't support the E900 thou.

The E900 is not the perfect camera by any means, but it's a pretty good deal right now. I picked up a second one a couple of months ago for $154 after the $50 Fuji rebate.

I'm sure there are many better sample photos out there as I'm relatively new to it all, but you can see some of mine at dehokens' photosets on Flickr . All were taken with my E900 with on-camera flash.

Good luck in your camera quest.

hi guys i got an e900 in the end, i got it second hand and am really happy with it, this is my first good camera that isint completly p&s so im going through the instruction book and the internet to find out how to use it,, when i wanna take a raw photo do i set it in the camer while im shooting or do i convert the files on my laptop when i have the pictures on screen??

You set the camera for RAW in picture settings for image quality. Usually, you'll have JPEG in Std, High Quality, Super High Quality and RAW. Sometimes it's normal, fine and RAW. You won't be able to just download the RAW pictures onto your computer like you do JPEGs. You need a RAW conversion program to process them, and when you're finished you convert them to JPEG, TIFF or BMP in the size and quality you want.

hi larry
i found the raw file switcher this morning, i took a couple of sample shots and converted them to tif format, the converter im using is the finepix one, is there any other converters out there i can get because it seems the fine pix one is really slow or something,or maybe its my laptop, do i have to buy the converters from a camera shop or are there any down loadable ones on the net u know of???

also ye know when i convert a raw file, well is all the information that makes it better for editing in photo shop lost because i have coverted it or is it then ready for editing in ps

sorry for the dumb questions larry, im new to raw files

thanks mate

Depending on what PS program you have, you should be able to download a photoshop RAW plug in for your camera. Then you can convert it in photoshop. Most RAW conversion programs require a lot of RAM. I had to buy a new computer to run my photo programs, because my old Pentium 850 wasn't fast enough and crashed or took all day to open one picture. If it runs PS, it should run the plug in program just as fast, though. You can go to the Adobe website, and look up the plug in under "downloads". Otherwise, the Fuji website might have a downloadable PS plug in as well.

The Fuji Finepix converter is pretty much worthless. All it allows you to do is convert it to a TIFF file with out allowing any adjustments which I'm sure you've found out.

I use Adobe Camera Raw in Photoshop CS2 to convert my E900 photos. Photoshop Elements has a RAW converter included (somewhat reduced in capability from the Full Photoshop package) that works just fine too. As this is an older camera now, even my Photoshop Elements v3.0 is able to convert the E900 RAW files. You might find a deal on an older copy of Elements since they have recently released v6.0.

Other options include S7RAW (freeware) found here finepix RAW decoder "s7raw" with a tutorial available here Matt Spinelli Photography - RAW Photo Editing with s7raw to help with its use. Another one I have used is UFRaw (freeware) UFRaw - Home which is based on the freeware command line RAW converter DCRaw. The final one I would recommend you check out is Raw Therapee (freeware) RawTherapee V2.3 released . I find this one a little slow, but it offers a lot of adjustment options.