Fuji F810 Experience? RAW Converters?

I'm going to take the P&S route for a new camera due to $$ constraints.

I'm quite excited to read about the new Fuji F810, the high resolution 6MP/12MP, lens quality and construction are awesome for a camera that's $330-$400 on the street. Lots of talk over at DigitalDiver.com.

Fuji has cases and Ike says he's working on one RSN. Full range of Inon products are available. In combo with the D2000 strobe this should be a nice system and will work for me as a backup when I move to a DSR.

Only drawbacks are the XD cards being expensive and the supplied Fuji RAW converter is a joke by most reviewers. The camera does make great JPEGS though.

Does anyone know anything more about this system, or have experience they'd like to share? Does anyone know of any forthcoming support for Adobe Digital negative or a better RAW converter plug-in for Photoshop CS for Mac?

Jack

Hi Jack,

I'm thinking about getting this camera as my topside compact to complement the Kodak beast. It takes beautiful photos and has a good form factor and the UW housing is a plus.

Fuji does not release the "proprietary" algorithm to decode RAW from their SuperCCD's. Adobe was smart enough to figure out a way to do it, but experts like Thom Hogan have said that it doesn't get the most out of the shot, like the Fuji EX software would. YMMV - I think the S2 shots converted with Adobe look great.

My gut is that since Adobe supports "prosumer" RAW cameras like the Nikon, Canon, and Oly, they SHOULD do a fuji 810 RAW converter in the next free update to Pshop CS. My fingers are crossed. Why not email Daniel or Julienne and ask them?

Cheers

James

I've been interested in this camera, but decided not to…

One problem is battery life – it’s very short, and that’s not good for a camera that should rest safely in a waterproof housing. It’s a pity they didn’t make the underwater housing for the E550 instead.

The lens stops at 32mm. That’s a little bit wider than most, but all that means is that you may have trouble using wide angle converters. They tend to assume there is a 35mm lens behind them.

I’ve decided that my next camera will either have electrical strobe synchronisation, or it should be possible to set the internal strobe mode to “slave” (as with my C-5060WZ). This excludes a lot of cameras!

/Anders

James, Does the exsisting adobe converter would with the 810, I thought it was just the higher end cameras.

Anders, yeah battery life is sort of low, I'm figuring an extra and two cards, sort of a pain. I'm wondering if there's a 3rd party battery with more Ahrs available. Something like this is usually taken care of.

The Inon lenses work well, there are very nice pics taken with both the W/A and macro on Digital Diver.

Jack

The 810 is not currently supported under ACR2.3

The new version of ACR2.4 does appear to "unofficially" support the F810, but the one user on the Adobe Forum doesn't seem very happy. In case this link doesn't work, click the "Now Available" link at the top of the page.

There are two freeware RAW converters out there. Here's a page describing them: http://www.gky.com.au/c/gky?a=da&did=19000000 . I'm curious about s7raw.

I have used ACR2.4 to convert F810 pictures and it works a treat.

Despite the fact that the F810 is not officially supported, it still seems to work fine. I think the RAW (RAF) file is the same as the F700 which is offically supported. Interestingly, the Adobe DNG converter also works on the Fuji files and reduces them from a massive 12MB to around 7MB, which is more reasonable for a 6MP camera.

I haven't tried the freeware converters mentioned by tie, but I do know that Pixmantic's new software does not work with Fuji F810 files.

I thought the whole point of DNG was to make RAW files more portable, but Pixmantec's RAW converter still doesn't work with converted F810 DNG files.

The whole point of DNG is to be a universal open standard for RAW files. It just happens that the Fuji F810s are only recognised by ACR2.4 as far as I can tell. I have had no luck with Pixmantec either.

Here is a great thread on the s7raw converter if you haven't figured it out yet.

It's in Italian, http://world.altavista.com/babelfish/ can translate it. It has a great style, e.g.: "s7raw is program less than 2Mb and is gratis; cameraraw one takes advantage of the mastodontica and inquantificabile less power of nothing po po than: Adobe PS!!"

I'd figured most things out, but was never sure of lens correction, and had never tried selective color adjustment. I had never tried the selective color highlights adjustment, but will next time.

Batch conversion is one of the first things you need to know to use this converter effectively. Basically, after editing an image, save the parameters. After finishing all images, add them to the batch converter, clicking the "Use saved parameters" checkbox.

FYI: The batch conversion feature of S7Raw is broken. First, it occasionally gives errors on certain files. These files can be processed normally, but not in any batch — they have to be processed one by one. Second, when you save parameters after editing an image, it does not save either the lens correction or the selective highlights parameters. These must therefore be the same for every image in the batch.

I discovered this after dropping the highlights in a number of photos with the selective colors command. I saved parameters after each image. After running the batch, I check an image and the highlights are gone. And the chromatic aberration is back. What a waste of time.