Thursday, October 4, 2007

Fujifilm FinePix S2 Pro Review

The Fujifilm FinePix S2 Pro was announced on January 30th 2002, almost three weeks before Nikon announced the D100 and Canon announced the EOS-D60. The S2 Pro replaces Fujifilm's first price breaking digital SLR the S1 Pro. Just like the S1 Pro the S2 Pro uses an almost-APS-size SuperCCD sensor, however this time the effective pixel count has increased from 3.4 million to 6.2 million. Also vastly improved is the choice of Nikon body on which the camera is based. The S1 Pro was based on the N60 (F60) and came in for some criticism for its features, finish and durability. The S2 Pro is based on Nikon's much improved N80 (F80) body which affords it a much more professional looking and robust body but also adds much need support for AF-S and VR lenses.

After processing the S2 Pro outputs a huge 12 megapixel image. If this is too large (and a 4.5 MB per JPEG it may well be) you can select a 6 megapixel output size. Because of the Honeycomb like layout of the SuperCCD this 6 megapixel image is created by first processing the 6 megapixel input pixels to a 12 megapixel image and then downsampling this image to 6 megapixels.

Other new features are summarized below, I've highlighted some of the more important points in bold type.

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