Fujifilm S3pro

Check it out! The full press release is listed on the Wetpixel news page.

Hotlinked from tallyns.com:

So, if this is the real deal:

No full frame sensor

Image sensors has 6 megapixels worth of "regular" sensors and another 6 of "high dynamic range" sensors. (6 S and 6 R).

1/180th sync (good)

Almost the same exact body as the S2 (Good for us and bad for others)

1-piece body - not a cobbled together N-80.

No more CR123A batteries!!! 4AA only.

D-TTL :-(

Cheers

James

So, if this is the real deal:

 

D-TTL :-(

 

James

Cheer up James. With the huge dynamic range from the extra photodiode you can shoot manual at full power on every shot and never have to worry about over exposure.

Seriouly, I'm looking forward to the results on dynamic range improvements.

I'm really excited to see what happens with the BLUE. Smooth gradients, maybe?

I think that the improved dynamic range sounds very interesting. I am amazed that they have gone to DTTL - it may be that the camera is also capable of S2 style TTL with older none DTTL flash guns? The press release doesn't say it isn't.

Alex

I'm really curious to see the dynamic range out of this. Sunballs maybe? Too bad on the dTTL, just hope they didn't kill the normal TTL.

Wonder how close it is to the existing body, maybe able to adapt the existing housings?

And, last of all, what about price? I can't stand these "releases" that don't tell you how much it will cost... :x

1) They got rid of the Frankencamera body design. This is good, but changes the physical dimensions and layout of the camera, meaning a change in housing design. The body changes only make it more like other competitive models.

2) Better synch, but not great.

3) AA batteries only. This isn't a breakthrough.

4) Sensor. This sensor was anounced almost a year ago. I've read they have had some delays in making the thing. Now we must wait for God knows how long until they start shipping these new sensors to determine if it is major leap forward in performance. In the mean time, lots of 300D's and D70's will be sold.

5) Where's the price point? Where could it possibly be? How could it sell for $500 more than the competition?

6) D-TTL. Why? They are now adopting D-TTL as Nikon moves to i-TTL.

I'm saddened. I was hoping for more. Enough to justify the next purchase. I want a 2nd unit, but I'm not sure this is the one.

It might be enough to beat the upcoming D2X in image quality assuming it's only 8MP and APS. Otherwise, it seems very nice by today's 6MP standards but a bit of a letdown otherwise. I don't think I'd prefer this to the current 14n (which could be had for under $2000 now). Perhaps Kodak has something good coming or we'll see the F6 soon.

Take a look at the high-res image on DPreview.com. The camera body and actual controls (command dials, shutter, mode dial, MSC control, etc) look to be in almost the EXACT same locations as on the S2pro.

I will wager 2 six-packs of Pyramid IPA that the S3pro will go right into an S2pro housing and have 80% of the functionality.

I spent a lot of time with my S2 last night (Not in THAT way) comparing it to the high-res pic. The buttons on the back have moved around some. The row of function buttons has moved vertically. The Back, Func, and Play buttons have also moved.

The menu/ok button looks like it's in the same position.

So if you can shoehorn the camera into an older housing, here's what features I use underwater that wouldn't be accessible:

Change image size/quality. (like from raw to jpeg)

Replay an image after the image review disappears (better look quickly!)

Custom White Balance

The main thing I want to know is if Fuji can read TTL off of this new sensor, or if they have gone completely to D-TTL (reads preflash reflection off of the shutter curtain).

Cheers

James

So, the $2000 (estimated street :?) question for James: Will you or wont you...?

So, the $2000 (estimated street  :?) question for James: Will you or wont you...?

But I guarentee if this fits into the S2 housing I will.

I don't use the functions people mentioned that wouldn't line up and I rarely use TTL, so I wont miss it that much anyway.

M

Good question Craig! I guess it depends on a couple of things:

Price - This camera will have a hard time competing with the D70 if it costs more than $1,500 street. The market that Fuji really supports is wedding and event photographers. They might pay more....might. But they love the S2 because of it's excellent flash exposures. If Fuji has had to go to D-TTL with their new sensor, this might not be the case...:-(

Features - This camera should IMO not be labelled the S3 - it's the S2 mk II in my opinion. They have made incremental improvements based on feedback from users - which I think is great. I'm really glad they fixed the battery situation and a few other minor defficiencies. But it's not a totally new camera. It still produces the same sized files using the same camera body.

So will I upgrade? I might - it would be nice if I could get a dedicated S3 housing and use my S2 body as a backup. That would be VERY cool. Plus, I have a feeling this SR sensor will do a GREAT job of capturing sunballs and sunbursts.

I'm not worried about the resolution - the resolution from Fuji RAW files falls somewhere around 9 megapixels - so to date the only cameras that can beat it in the "pixel wars" are the 1Ds and the 14n.I think the D2x will be 8 megapixel APS sensor.

Cheers

James

I'll take that bet James, even though I don't know what Pyramid IPA is. You are probably looking at a mockup.

Paul, just out of curiosity, what would be the compelling reason to upgrade from an S2 to the S3? Any improvement in image quality is yet to be seen. Are there any reasons to upgrade other than a real improvement in image quality?

When the D2H with the Nikon designed LBCAST sensor came out, every one kept talking about better image quality, yet all the hype and technical talk aside, images didn't look much better or worse.

I was hoping that rationalizing the purchase of the S3 would be as easy as the waitress coercing me to order a chocolate dessert.

You're on George. If you come to Seaspace in June, I'll be we can have this settled by then.

Gawd, I hope so. When the S2 was announced at PMA, I got mine at the beginning of July - and I got the first retail one sold in the USA. That took a bit long... At least I think it was announced at PMA - I'll have to check. Hopefully Fuji can "beat their record."

Cheers

James

If will produce better "wide angle" blues, reduce the sun burnout AND fit into my Aquatica housing, I will get one as soon as the Japanese discounters offer it.

Otherwise if it will produce better blues but, NOT fit in my housing I will have to wait a bit as Aquatica retools a housing for it.

If none of the above, I will pass!, but I do plan to add a second system in the future which allow me to shoot both macro and wide angle on a single dive. Now just waiting for the right camera.

6 am time to dive!

Chris

Does anyone know what the attenuation factor is between the high and low sensitivity sensors? If its pretty wide, and _if_ the software for dealing with it is good, this camera will probably be unbeatable for high dynamic range scenes, escpec sunbursts. You'll be able to take something approaching and HDR photo in one shot, and feed it to a tonemapping program.

Chrisg

What in the heck is a tone mapping program :oops :?

Digitally ignorant!

Chris

Guys, Guys, Guys,

Get real. Fuji has just told the whole underwater contingent to turn around and bend over.

Do you really think this camera will be compatible with normal TTL?

What Fuji has done is offer you a "supposed" better CCD chip and at the cost of the one thing that made the S2 a viable underwater camera - TTL with underwater strobes. I say "supposed" because that is the exact word used in the DPreview test report on the Fuij F700, the first camera released with this new superchip. The tester wrote "I am still not overly impressed with the supposed extended dynamic range." CHECK OUT THE TEST REPORT YOURSELVES! And along with this new superchip you get AA battery only operation,which you can already do with the S2, and the really mediocre F80 auto-focus.

One of you wrote that with the new chip you could probably shoot everything on full power manual and the chip would keep you from frying the image. Even if this would be true for macro, it would still do nothing with regard to balancing of flash and ambient light in fill flash situations, which can be done best with TTL, and at least fairly well with the S2.

As far as my dollars are concerned, the S3 is D.O.A.

As I see it, our only hope now is that Aquatica's breakthrough on decoding Canon's E-TTL on the D300 can be extended upward to the 1D and 1Ds. And their successors. Or that someone will decode Nikon's various digital TTL's and put them in an underwater strobe.

I'll be shooting film underwater for at least another year or two.

Dive Gypsy

A tonemapping program takes as input an image whose contrast is far beyond what your monitor can display, and through a model of the human visual system, creates an image which can be displayed on your monitor's limited contrast, which tries to perceptually match the "real" image. It can be thought of as a sort of computerized version of the zonal system, combined with automated dodging and burning. But it can produce realistic looking images which can't be produced with any conventional darkroom technique.

heres an example, a quick snapshot:

This was created by taking a series of exposures at different time values.

The ratio of the brightest portion to the darkest is over 200,000 to 1 (Velvia film can capture about 6000:1). In any of the single exposures, if you can see details in the highlights, then the bookshelf and furniture are completely black, and if you can see detail in the room, then the highlights are completely white and featureless and blooming.

I loaded these exposures into HDRShop, which used a calibration curve

to combine these images into one high dynamic range image. Once you have that image, you can edit it, manually change exposure over many ranges of stops, or feed it to the tonemapping plugin.

Note that the image has detail both in the shadows and the highlights, but still conveys the impression of very bright light sources in a dark room.

Underwater it would be tough to use this multi-image technique, since you need the images to line up perfectly. I have heard of people modifiying one of those muti-image prism filters to have some of the images darker than the others so that an HDR image could be taken in one shot.

If you had a digital camera that could capture an HDR image in one shot, it wouldn't even need exposure controls. Any exposure level can be synthesized at high quality from the one HDR image in software.

Super cool! How many "Stops" is 200,000:1 of contrast? Or is that even a valid way to characterize it?

Cheers

James