Let's have a look at Venice, which I visited last year with a Fuji S5. Inevitably I end up with more photographs than I can use, so they sit on a hard drive gathering digital dust until I decide to dig them out.
My trip was mostly an excuse to carry around a big, heavy Mamiya twin-lens
reflex with a
55mm f/5.4
lens - the widest for the Mamiya C-series TLR system - but I also took along
my Fuji S5 and a fisheye lens because I love carrying things.
The Fuji S5 was launched in 2007. I've written about it before. Despite being twelve years old it still has very impressive dynamic range. Back in the 2000s the camera market only cared about megapixels, but in a move that was either very brave or completely misguided Fuji decided to prioritise vivid colours and dynamic range for their S3 and S5 SLRs.
They both used Fuji's clever SuperCCD SR sensor, which was designed to capture highlights without blowing them out. The image taken from the belltower above came out of the camera looking like this:
Which is more or less the correct exposure, although without digital burning it looks very bland. If the image had been shot with a compact camera the sky would be blown out irrevocably, and even with a digital SLR shooting a RAW file the sky would probably look something like the following if you had tried to burn the clouds:
The S3 and S5 on the other hand had a multilayered sensor, with two sets of photosites. There were six megapixels of full-sized photosites that captured the bulk of the image, plus six megapixels of tiny photosites studded in between the standard photosites that captured the same image underexposed by four stops. Photosites photosites photosites. There must have been a better way to write that sentence without using the word photosites so much.
The camera's internal software produced relatively muted results, and
contemporary versions of Photoshop couldn't make use of the extra pixels, but
nowadays the S3 and S5's RAW files are easy to work with using Adobe Camera
Raw. A quick go with the graduated filter brings out lots of detail in the
sky, and you can go mad with this, as if you were top Romantic painter John
Martin and you wanted to scare people.
On a physical level the S3 was built around a Nikon F80 and had a slow data buffer that made it difficult to use for anything fast-moving, such as wedding photography; the S5 was essentially a Nikon D200 with Fuji electronics, but although it fixed the S3's problems it was too little, too late. Back then people wanted full-frame and sixteen megapixels, not APS-C and definitely not six megapixels.
Historically Fuji was out of step with the times, but only just. In 2007 Nikon launched the D3, which was a game-changer. Its emphasis on higher ISOs over megapixels caught the imagination of photographers, and almost overnight the competition seemed to give up on the megapixel wars and prioritise dynamic range instead. There were still high-resolution cameras, but they didn't have the same cachet. Fuji's digital SLRs had very good light sensitivity, although they weren't in the same league as the D3, and sadly there was never a full-frame SuperCCD SR sensor.
Modern digital SLRs approach the same dynamic range as the S3 and S5, but they tend to prioritise noise-free shadows, which is slightly more awkward to process with Photoshop. Processing S3 and S5 files is similar to burning black and white film, but lifting shadows is unintuitive.
The two cameras still have a cult following. The S3 is flimsier and slower, but uses standard AA batteries. The S5 is objectively superior - faster, more robust, and it will meter with manual focus lenses, whereas the S3 won't - but the batteries are long out of production. Frustratingly the S5 can't use D200 batteries, even though they're physically identical. Over time it will suffer the same fate as the Kodak DCS 14n / DCS Pro SLR, death-by-proprietary-battery, but for now it's still one of a kind albeit that there were two of them so it's one of two-of-a-kind the end.
On a physical level the S3 was built around a Nikon F80 and had a slow data buffer that made it difficult to use for anything fast-moving, such as wedding photography; the S5 was essentially a Nikon D200 with Fuji electronics, but although it fixed the S3's problems it was too little, too late. Back then people wanted full-frame and sixteen megapixels, not APS-C and definitely not six megapixels.
Historically Fuji was out of step with the times, but only just. In 2007 Nikon launched the D3, which was a game-changer. Its emphasis on higher ISOs over megapixels caught the imagination of photographers, and almost overnight the competition seemed to give up on the megapixel wars and prioritise dynamic range instead. There were still high-resolution cameras, but they didn't have the same cachet. Fuji's digital SLRs had very good light sensitivity, although they weren't in the same league as the D3, and sadly there was never a full-frame SuperCCD SR sensor.
Modern digital SLRs approach the same dynamic range as the S3 and S5, but they tend to prioritise noise-free shadows, which is slightly more awkward to process with Photoshop. Processing S3 and S5 files is similar to burning black and white film, but lifting shadows is unintuitive.
The two cameras still have a cult following. The S3 is flimsier and slower, but uses standard AA batteries. The S5 is objectively superior - faster, more robust, and it will meter with manual focus lenses, whereas the S3 won't - but the batteries are long out of production. Frustratingly the S5 can't use D200 batteries, even though they're physically identical. Over time it will suffer the same fate as the Kodak DCS 14n / DCS Pro SLR, death-by-proprietary-battery, but for now it's still one of a kind albeit that there were two of them so it's one of two-of-a-kind the end.
