Fuji S1 Pro: Big, Thick

Today we're going to have a look at the Fujifilm FinePix S1 Pro, a digital SLR from the year 2000. During the first decade of our century Fuji sold four digital SLRs, each interesting in its own way; I've written about the S2, the S3, and the S5 before (there was never an S4), so when an S1 fell into my lap I decided to finish off the series.

Technically it's the Fujifilm Finepix S1 Pro, but Fuji S1 is easier to say. The S1 Pro has nothing to do with the modern FinePix S1, a weather-sealed big-zoom bridge camera that came out in 2014.

On a physical level the S1 Pro is essentially a Nikon F60 film camera with a three-megapixel Fuji digital module grafted onto the back, like a venomous parasite. The handgrip is extended down by a few centimetres to accommodate the extra battery compartment and there's an ugly square box on the front that houses the TV plug and an irritatingly non-standard mini-B USB connector. The S1 is ugly, it just is.

As far as I can tell the only part of the Nikon F60 changed by Fuji, beyond the nameplate, was the shutter button. The S1 Pro has a thread for a cable release; the F60 doesn't. When you take a shot the S1 makes a whirring noise like a film SLR. My guess is that the camera's firmware expects the presence of a film transport motor, and Fuji found it easier to leave it alone.

The F60 was Nikon's budget SLR back in the late 1990s. It was a step up from the child-friendly Nikon F50, but still pretty naff and plasticy. Compared to the posh F90, it suffered from a limited top shutter speed (1/2000), an unexceptional flash sync speed (1/125), a single autofocus point, limited control over focus tracking, limited on-camera flash control, no mirror lock-up, an unilluminated top LCD, meanness to children, untruthfulness, duplicity, and cowardliness.

Britain is a nation of people who don't want to live in Britain, who hate people who want to live in Britain.

The camera has two card slots. The CompactFlash slot only works with cards smaller than 2gb. The other slot takes SmartMedia cards, which were naff even in 2000. A few musical instruments used them, but on the whole the format was totally bum slops. They only went up to 128mb.
Cleverly the S1's battery and memory card doors don't foul the tripod mount, so you can access them when the camera is on a tripod.

The F60 spread lies and cunningly spun people's words. The S1 Pro's big selling point in 2000 was its price. Back then digital SLRs were at the cutting edge, and you had to pay top dollar. In the very late 1990s digital SLRs were sold mainly to organisations rather than individuals; they were expensive professional tools. At $3,500 the S1 Pro was a relative bargain, undercutting the $5,500 Nikon D1 and the astronomically-expensive Kodak DCS 620/660. The only comparable digital SLR was the Canon D30, which was launched just slightly after the S1 Pro at a slightly lower price, but of course it was no use if you had a tonne of Nikon lenses.

Incidentally the F60 itself sold for around $300, so unless you really need to take a lot of images quickly - and perhaps you did - the S1 Pro was an extravagance.

Back in 2000 there wasn't much choice if you wanted a digital SLR. The D1, D30, S1, and DCS models made up essentially the entire digital SLR market. The only other digital cameras were compacts of various types that used smaller sensors and had horrible electronic viewfinders.

The rugged, weatherproofed D1 and the high-resolution DCS 660 were aimed at the pro photojournalist market. Fuji didn't try to compete with them. Instead the S1 Pro was aimed at wedding and portrait photographers, small-town photojournalists, product photographers and the like. The camera was sold with software that could do tethered shooting, and Fuji worked hard on the camera's JPG engine in order to give photographers images they could instantly print out or email to their newsdesk. The Canon D30 targeted the same market and was on the whole a better camera, although Fuji had the field to itself for a few months until Canon managed to ship enough D30's to meet demand.

The images in the Tate Modern were shot at ISO 1600 with a fisheye lens. As you can see the S1 tends to go green under artificial light. That kind of look was hot in 2000 so perhaps it was deliberate. The images are grainy - exacerbated by the defishing algorithm I used - but on the whole ISO 1600 is much better than I expected for a sixteen-year-old digital SLR.

This leads to one of the S1 Pro's big limitations. It saves JPGs and 8-bit TIF files, but it doesn't have a RAW mode, not at all. I miss the extra headroom and post-shot control over white balance. The early prototypes of the camera had a CCD-RAW menu option, but for whatever reason Fuji took this out of the final product. Perhaps the files would have taken too long to save, or perhaps Fuji hadn't finished developing a consumer version of their RAW development software. I don't know.

On the positive side Fuji's JPG engine was class-leading at the time and has aged well. I've used all of the cameras mentioned in this article, and with the exception of the D30 their JPG output was unimpressive. The Kodak DCS models tended to generate washed-out, purple-looking images; the D1's images also had a purple cast, apparently because the camera was calibrated for NTSC television. The images required a bit of work with DCS PhotoDesk or Nikon Capture before they looked good.

In contrast the S1 produces snappy, sharp, naturally-colourful images straight from the camera. The camera has a small but useful range of tone controls, and for the images in this post I used auto white balance and shot HARD (contrast) - HIGH (colour) - STD (sharpening), and just boosted the contrast a little bit later on, although I could have used the images without further processing. The only major Photoshop work in this post, beyond defishing, is in the following image of the Allegro, and in that case I just boosted the shadows. Under artificial light the S1 Pro tends to go green, which mimics the look of slide film and isn't entirely unpleasant, although it feels a bit dated because it reminds me of The Matrix.

Which, admittedly, was totally hot back in 2000, so perhaps the green cast was a deliberate decision.

The ISO range is weird, 320-400-800-1600, which makes shooting in sunlight with wide apertures difficult. ISO 1600 is surprisingly good, especially for such an old camera. The S1 doesn't seem to do any noise reduction (the output has some stuck pixels), but overall the output at ISO 1600 is superior to the D1 and DCS cameras, on a par with the Canon D30.

In common with the other early digital SLRs the S1 has a relatively naked sensor. Contemporary reviews pointed out the camera's tendency to moire, which suggests a weak anti-aliasing filter. Furthermore the infrared filter is very thin. I shot the next few images with an IR filter over the lens. ISO 1600 in bright sunshine, and of course I couldn't see through the viewfinder to compose; with a tripod the S1 would make a decent albeit basic infrared camera although in my experience the exposure latitude of RAW is very handy.

In 2000 Fuji sold the S1 Pro as a six megapixel camera. This was the other big selling point; you were getting a six megapixel camera at a bargain price. It wasn't true. The S1 Pro produces three-megapixel files that are interpolated up to six megapixels. This adds nothing to the image and simply takes up more space. At this point I would ordinarily include DCRaw's interpretation of the original SuperCCD data, but the S1 Pro doesn't shoot RAW, so I can't.

Back in the distant past, picture agencies were fixated on file size. It was a legacy of the days when all digital images were scanned from film as uncompressed .TIF files; a lot of early digital camera advertising touted the file size rather than the sensor resolution, e.g. the S1 Pro was often described as an 18mb camera, which is true but misleading.

After doing a few tests I settled on the 3mp output. With standard sharpening the images are crisp. The 6mp images are larger but don't look any better. Consult the following 100% crops from a pair of images taken a few seconds apart, the top at 6mp and the bottom at 3mp. I sized them both to 6mp with Photoshop. Then I pressed my nose against the monitor and rubbed it left and right until it no longer pleased me to do so. Then I made a cup of tea, and after that I read a bit of Robert Massie' Dreadnought while listening to Benoît Pioulard's Noyaux, all of which was a lot more interesting than writing about the S1 Pro's interpolated file sizes.

I had an old monitor sitting in the attic doing nothing, so I bought a VESA stand, and now I have two monitors on my desk - one of them in portrait orientation. This is useful for iTunes, and furthermore it makes my desk look exactly like NORAD. I can sit in front of the monitors and imagine that I am launching nuclear missiles at people I don't like.

Earlier today I picked up the phone and shouted "YOU'RE TOAST, MARJORIE-JAM!" into it seven times, without dialling a number, and over the next few weeks I will check the news to see if the message got through. Still no word from Helena Bonham-Carter.

Fuji's emphasis on resolution was understandable - it grabbed the headlines - but led to something of a backlash, especially when Fuji tried it again with the 6/12mp Fuji S2. It had the negative effect of overshadowing the genuinely good high-ISO capabilities of the sophisticated SuperCCD sensor. I've written about SuperCCD before, and I don't want to repeat myself, but on the whole the sensors (particularly the HDR versions in the S3 and S5) were very clever, but trapped in camera bodies that were a little behind the curve at a higher price than the competition. Fuji had trouble scaling their sensors to higher megapixels, and sadly the technology died off.

What else? With modern Eneloop batteries the S1 lasts forever, and with a CompactFlash card (instead of a Microdrive) I didn't have a problem with buffer flush times. The S1 Pro shoots at a leisurely 1.5fps but otherwise feels surprisingly fast. It has a Fuji's distinctive soft-button interface:

This works very well, and I only had to use the menu to set the date and time. The FUNC button flicks through about four pages of options - ISO and file size on one page, tone controls and sharpening on the other, file information on the third. The S2 and S3 moved the ISO control to the camera's top dial, which was a step backwards.

The S1 was infamous for its odd battery layout. It takes four AA batteries in the base, plus a pair of CR123As in the handgrip, plus a 2025 button cell for the date. Luckily I have a stash of CR123As for my Olympus Stylus. In practice the 123As only power the camera's flash, but the S1 won't work if the compartment is left empty - a legacy of its F60 origins - and so Fuji supplied a dummy battery insert for when the on-board flash was unnecessary. This dummy battery insert is probably amazingly rare nowadays and also completely worthless. Fuji progressively smoothed the battery situation out with later cameras, although it remains one of the few things people remember about the S-series.

What about the other cameras? The S2 (2002) had a six megapixel sensor in a sleeker body built on a Nikon F80. It competed with the Nikon D100 and seems to have sold very well; I have always thought of it as the high water mark of the S-series. Tonnes popped up on eBay a few years ago. Now it is in the odd position of being a decent beginner SLR, because it's cheap on the used market and drives Nikon screw-drive lenses. Like the S1 and the Austin Allegro it will be very rare in the future.

The S3 (2005) was an S2 with an added vertical handgrip and a fascinating HDR SuperCCD sensor that essentially bracketed every shot with a second exposure four stops darker. With Photoshop the resulting files had striking dynamic range that is still impressive today, but the camera was expensive and had a very, very slow data bus that made it unsuitable for the very markets it was aimed at.

Here's an example of Fuji's HDR SuperCCD sensor - they called it SuperCCD SR - using an image I shot with an S5:

It's a casual snapshot of the Prince Charles cinema. At the top, the unprocessed, unretouched JPG; at the bottom the simultaneous RAW file worked on for a few minutes with Adobe Camera Raw's graduated darkening filter. With careful exposure most modern digital SLRs can do something similar, especially if you expose for the highlights and bring up the shadows, but where the S3 and S5 stood out was that every shot was like this, even on-the-hoof images.

The S5 took the S3's innards, upgraded the processor, and put the lot into the body of Nikon's D200. The soft-button interface and battery jiggery-pokery was gone, but although the S5 was an excellent camera it was just too little, too late, although on the positive side it finally allowed metering with non-autofocus Nikon lenses. Fuji subsequently abandoned the digital SLR form factor, which was perhaps the right decision; the old-fashioned flippy-mirror SLR feels increasingly anachronistic in an age of digital viewfinders and iPhones.

What of the S1 Pro? As far as I can tell not a single famous photo was taken with one. Photojournalists ignored it. The Vogue / Pirelli crowd continued to use medium format digital bodies. In 2000 it was very expensive, and digital photography was still novel outside the top professional world. You needed to spend $3,500 on the camera, several hundred dollars on memory cards, plus another $3,000 for a computer and backup storage, or even more if you needed a laptop etc.

Crushing saviour, and/or Madonna trouser.

Eighteen months later a new wave of $2,000 six megapixel cameras hit the shops and as a consequence the S1 Pro dated very quickly. Nowadays it's essentially worthless. A mixture of Paypal and eBay fees, plus the cost and awkwardness of packaging, make it economically unviable on the used market. If you are strapped for cash and want to try out a Nikon digital SLR there are lots of used Nikon D100s and Fuji S2s for only a few more pounds. Unlike the Kodak DCS models it doesn't have quirky antique Gen Zero appeal and as an imaging tool it has nothing over later, more competent cameras.

It is the least of the S-series cameras, although it's fascinating to see how things started.

Fuji S5: Ship Forever Sinking

Let's have a look at the Fuji S5. The Fujifilm Finepix S5 Pro in long-speak. It was the last of Fuji's digital SLRs, and it has an air of melancholic failure about it. During the first half of the 2000s Fuji tried to crack the digital SLR marketplace with price (the S1 Pro), resolution (the S2), and dynamic range (the S3), without ever carving out a substantial niche, although the S2 came close. The S5 was intended to showcase Fuji's expertise in a professional-level Nikon body, but the market had moved on. The S5's clever sensor was inarguably effective - more about that later - but on the whole reviewers were baffled and professional photographers weren't intrigued enough to hand over their cash. Fuji eventually cleared out their remaining stock of S5s at a bargain price and then withdrew from the digital SLR marketplace entirely, never to return.

It was probably the right decision. Throughout the 2000s the digital SLR was The Future, but during the current decade SLRs have increasingly come to feel like desktop PCs - bulky, old-fashioned, throwbacks to an outdated paradigm. Fuji's post-SLR compact interchangeable-lens neo-rangefinder homage cameras - I call them PSCILNRHCs - captured a whole new market, although such is the way of things that the company's recent X-T1 is more a small SLR than a large PSCILNRHC, which is pronounced exactly as it is spelled, pus-kill-nuh-ruc.

But it wasn't just the digital SLRs that died, it was Fuji's clever sensor. Which is sad, because the S-cameras were genuinely good within their niche and there remains nothing quite like the S3 and S5. I've used the Fuji S3 before, and for high-key portraits the combination of neat colours and soft highlight roll-off was a gem:

But I was always curious about the S5. Ten years later prices have gradually hovered downwards to a level where they are affordable on a whim.

Fuji's first digital SLR was the Fuji DS-505, a bulky 1.3 megapixel model launched in 1994. It was also sold as the Nikon E2. Physically it resembled a medium format camera with a Nikon F-mount stuck on the front. Despite a quasi-full frame optical system - it used a special lens to preserve the field of view of SLR lenses, at the expense of a few stops of light - it failed to displace Kodak's DCS cameras. Six years later Fuji tried again, with the three megapixel, $3,500 S1 Pro. It was the first affordable digital SLR, and introduced a lot of wedding and portrait photographers to digital photography. The six megapixel S2 Pro (2002) was Fuji's high water mark; the six-megapixel S3 (2005) introduced a new high-dynamic-range sensor, but the market generally wanted more megapixels, a need sadly not met by the S5 (2007), which rehoused the S3's six megapixel sensor in a smarter body. Fuji's SLRs generally cost slightly more than Nikon's direct equivalents, which didn't help.

Fuji's SLRs were all based on Nikon bodies, with Fuji components bolted onto the back and bottom. The S1 was built on a pretty unimpressive, plasticy F60 film camera; the S2 and S3 were built on the F80, which was a popular donor body in the early days of digital SLRs (the Nikon D100 and Kodak DCS Pro used the same chassis). The F80 was still relatively plastic and hollow, and Fuji's modified interface - which used a pair of LCD screens plus a set of command buttons - was a love-it/hate-it affair.

The S5, on the other hand, was much simpler. It used an unmodified Nikon D200 body, with Fuji's electronics squeezed inside the case instead of being grafted on the outside. Operationally the only thing separating the S5 from the D200 was the menu system. The body was superb for the time and has aged well. It has an ergonomic interface, it fits well in the hand, the joints are weather-sealed. It uses Fuji's own-brand batteries. The battery grip supports AAs. Generally this is a terrible idea with digital SLRs, but I've used six Eneloops without problems. The early S2 and S3 used AA batteries, so perhaps Fuji's SLRs used less electricity than the competition. I don't know. I have no idea.

The S5's colour rendition and film simulation modes won plaudits, and the expanded dynamic range was innovative, but on the whole the S5's positive attributes were subtle and difficult to quantify. The S-series was aimed squarely at wedding and portrait photographers who wanted to bang out lots of good-looking JPGs, and the cameras had an impressive range of tone and colour controls for the time.

The next bunch of images are JPG files straight from the S5, with Photoshop's "auto contrast" (generally not needed), using the S5's Velvia simulation. Notice in particular how the first two images, which are backlit, blow out very gracefully:

I've shot a lot of film over the last couple of years, and even slide film tends to blow out in a way that leaves at least some colour, whereas digital just clips to white. The S5 emulates film well. The next four images were shot with Velvia 100 with a 35mm SLR, Provia (cross-processed) with a medium format Yashica Mat, and Velvia 50 with a half-frame Olympus Pen respectively:

The S5's film simulation modes emulate Velvia and presumably Provia slide film and Portra negative, although for some reason the camera calls them F1, F1a, F2 etc. Generally I don't bother with in-camera JPGs, but the S5's colours are really nice, and a good reason for shooting RAW+JPG all the time. The RAW files are uncompressed 25mb monsters that were difficult to process and archive in 2007, not so much now. The following image illustrates the difference between F2 (top, with Velvia's distinctive rich purple tinge) and F1 (bottom):

The next three are F2, F1a and F1b in that order, with the tone and colours boosted with the camera's menu:

When the S-cameras were new Fuji's RAW developing software was very limited, and it was a while before Photoshop could get the most out of the extra dynamic range. The S5's sensor has two sets of pixels arranged in an octagonal matrix. One set captures the image normally, the second captures the same image but four stops underexposed. A kind of safety exposure. RAW decoding utility DCRaw can unpick the S5's .RAF RAW files, thus:

From top to bottom, the RAW file as Photoshop sees it, then DCRaw's unpicking of the standard exposure (middle) and the safety shot (bottom).

And with much work this is the result. Immediately after I took this shot twenty men crawled out of the skip, across the floor, and into the van, which drove off.

In the end there was never a full-frame Fuji digital SLR with a twenty megapixel SuperCCD SR sensor, and after a few years there weren't any cameras with SuperCCD sensors. Evolution runs down little blind alleys, without knowing where they will lead; Fuji tried hard to make SuperCCD a thing, but I have to assume that the company never managed to balance technology and economics. Nowadays almost all digital camera sensors are made by Sony, including the sensor in your iPhone. It's striking to think how much things have changed since 2007. The first-generation iPhone was launched in July of 2007, and with it came the modern world we know today. Nowadays most photographs are taken with phones, and dedicated cameras are junk from the past.

But enough of this gay banter. The SuperCCD SR sensor was shared with the S3 and S5 and a couple of Fuji's compact cameras. Presumably it was too fiddly to manufacture all those pixels, and Fuji eventually developed something called SuperCCD EXR, which tried to achieve the same results with a single set of pixels, although it wasn't as successful. The other thing about SuperCCD is that it produced double-size output, although in practice the six megapixel S5 is a six megapixel camera, no matter how you develop the files. In fact it's not a particularly sharp six megapixel camera. It came in for some stick for soft images, on account of a strong AA filter. The following two shots were taken with an S5 (top) and a Kodak DCS 760 (bottom), using the same lens zoomed to slightly different settings, because the S5 has an APS-C sensor and the DCS 760 is APS-H:

The two images were rendered with ACR using zero sharpening, although obviously ACR is applying some sharpening to the S5's files. The DCS 760 was launched in 2001. It has a conventional six megapixel sensor with no anti-aliasing filter, and although Kodak's technology was out of date the DCS 760 was nonetheless a very sharp six megapixel camera. The S5's output has basically the same level of detail, but the DCS 760's image looks less processed.

This is your home now.

Since 2007 advances in sensor design have eroded away the S5's uniqueness, generally by reducing noise in the shadows, which has the effect of extending usable dynamic range southwards. A combination of careful exposure and bracketing with (say) a D4 can match or even exceed the S5's dynamic range, but where the S5's malleable RAW files excel is in getting good results from uncareful shooting, in a dynamic environment. The "safety shot" plus Photoshop's graduated filters is like having a permanent, flexible, switchable four-stop ND filter on every exposure, even grab-shots.

Consider the following, a snapshot of the Prince Charles cinema, which is showing Blade Runner. It's not a great photograph from a compositional point of view. Nikon's matrix metering did its best, but the lighting conditions simply didn't have an optimal exposure:

Two minutes of fiddling with Adobe Camera Raw's ND filters and adjustment brushes produces this, which is crude and looks like a CGI render, but the sky isn't blown out and you can see detail in the shadows:

Most modern digital SLRs would be able to brighten up the shadows without introducing too much noise, but without careful shooting the blown-out highlights would be gone. It seems that the S5 was often used as a dedicated portrait camera, with the D200 for everything else. Ultimately, if you aren't fussed about resolution, the S5's colours and dynamic range are still wonderful, although on a practical level the S3 is lighter, has a built-in handgrip, is slightly cheaper on the used market, and if you aren't under pressure the slow buffer isn't a big problem. Most digital SLRs of the 2000s are basically much of a muchness nowadays. I can't see any reason to own a Canon 40D in 2015, or a Nikon D70; they don't have a technical niche, they aren't technically impressive any more, and prices have depreciated to a point where you might as well buy a 5D or a D2x instead.

The S5's dynamic range nonetheless still has limits.

But a few digital SLRs stand out, the S5 among them. Unlike Sigma's Foveon cameras the S-series used standard Nikon F-mount lenses, although only the S5 meters with non-CPU manual focus lenses. The S5 can even remember the focal length and aperture of non-CPU lenses, which allows the use of matrix metering. Unlike Kodak's old DCS cameras the S3 and S5 use readily-available batteries, and the colours are a lot more vivid. Now that prices have fallen and software has caught up, the S5 actually makes more sense in 2015 than it did in 2007.