User reviews for Fujifilm FinePix E900 Zoom: Digital Photography Review

Opinion: My E900 was purchased to fulfil a particular need. I own or have owned 9 digital cameras and my main camera is the excellent Panasonic FZ50. What I also needed, that the FZ50 did not give, was a camera to capture some quick moment. For this I needed it to be easily usable with just one hand, with a fast turn-on to shot time. From my research and hand-testing the E900 seems to have no clear close rival. It has an excellent grip, easy to find and operate power button (not small and slippery), very fast lens operate and quick shot time. With pre-focus the time-to-shot is a blinding 10ms.

I am very happy with this camera. With some correction I find this 9.0meg camera is not that far behind my FZ50 in image quality. Its high ISO performance is pretty good. ISO 800 is just about usable (it is very borderline on the FZ50). This camera gives me the shots I would otherwise miss.

Very good battery life.

Buy a good LCD protection screen so you can rattle this camera around in your pocket without a case (there are a number of crummy protection screens around)

Problems: Not problems really, but just deficiencies.
1. No EVF (Nikon P60 has one, but not a nice camera to handle and is slow)
2. Significant Chromatic aberration. However Paint Shop Pro PHOTO X2 does a great job removing this, so I'm ok
3. No hand-shake correction (pity)
4. No ISO AUTO option under "P" mode (annoying, but I guess this reduces shutter lag).
5. some barrel distortion, but again can be corrected (if needed)
6. as reported before, the mode select dial can move in your pocket. I suggest a tape strip to stop this

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Opinion: I bought the E900 as a companion to my S9500 which I have had for over 2 years: same CCD and same menu system. In fact the E900 menus are easier to use in many ways compared to the S9500.

The outstanding feature of the E900 is the sharpness of the lens. Extremely sharp right to the edges.

The colours are natural.

Build quality very good.

An extremely easy to use camera for setting EV compensation, bracketting, top 4 shots, etc

A further plus is the ability to shoot RAW, which I have not done yet, but plan to move there in the future.

Problems: I find Sanyo Eneloop batteries work well and avid some of the battery life problems that some users have reported.

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Opinion: The camera is great...full manual controls, great high ISO ability, RAW, and if you buy it now, its very cheap. However, this is an advanced compact aimed towards people who are learning photography or already know it.

Its is well built. but dont expect it to take any large hits well.

It features RAW in a small package, which apeals to many experienced shooters. However, the write time is slow, and coupled with the Xd card format, even slower.

The IQ is class leading for its time, and still can give cameras a run for their money ,especially keeping price in mind.

While some may find Canons menu system very simple and easy to use, the E900's menu system works well enough. For the crowd this camera is aimed at, you shouldnt be concenred if the RAW option is a few clicks away.

The camera will focus loudly, and may serve as a disturbance in quiet public events. No AF assist beam also slows the focus proccess. Flash recycle time is also very low.

In the end, I reccomend this camera to people who want high quality images in a portable and cheap package. I find that this camera does great outdoors, and should be in the pocket of any nature photographer where write speed or lack of AF assist beams will be of no importance.

Think of this camera like a snapping turtle: slow, but if it get close to you; watch out.

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Opinion: natural colors. not over the top saturated nor too under saturated. raw mode is good for people who like post processing. superccd gives low noise in high iso pictures, without sacrificing too much details. 9mp makes cropping easy.

Problems: minor annoyance -the camera does not remember some settings such as the timer, have to set it everytime after taking a picture. flash recharge is slow.

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Opinion: Very impressed overall. RAW is a plus. An update with image stabilization would be radical! Super CCD must do something; seems to have good shadow detail. Not since my S2 had I been so impressed.

Problems: None

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Opinion: I have been looking for a camera for mountaineering and ski touring
trying to meet the follwing requirements:

o) Image quality high as possible
o) Weight under 300g
o) Compact
o) Manual control

The requirements are conflicting and the compromise was E900.
I have bought it in winter 2006 and made some few thousand photos up to now.
This review reflects the experience of using e990 as a mountaineering camera
in relatively demanding outdoor conditions in rain, snow and cold.

Positive:
------------
o) The size and weight are still appropriate, smaller would be better.
o) Good image quality, low noise. The images are not overprocessed in the camera and there is full flexibility in post-processing.
o) Manual/semi-manual control. Very important for summit panoramas. Unfortunantely the exposure numbers on LCD are very small and in intensive sunshine its difficult to see something.
o) Power supply. Re-chargable batteries are excellent.
o) Start up, shut down, AF/AE is fast enough for all practical situations

Negative:
-------------
o) Photography mode dial is too loose. From time to time it changes position by taking the camera out of the pocket or bag. Very disturbing, each time its necessary to check if the mode is correct.
o) Voice recorder. Would be very useful for remarks, especially when tour lasts few days and few hundred photos are taken. Unfortunately its hidden in menu on page 2 and requires multiple clicks to reach. In a bright sunshine its not usable.
o) View finder. Its not hermetic and in rain or even in very high moisture conditions its covered by vapour from inside, takes half a day to dry.
o) As mentioned, font on LCD too small for out door conditions

But are the alternatives ?

Nikon P5000 ?
Ricoh GX 100 ?
Canon A640 ?

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Opinion: I added an E900 to our set of compact cameras a few weeks ago. Here are some observations:

For those who want a compact camera with manual modes and a good quality CCD, there are fewer and fewer options. Canon stopped the S series (it appears) with the s80. Now one would have to get the bigger G series, or settle for a consumer level A-series with only 1/2.5" CCD. Fuji has also removed manual fetures from their compact cameras.

I use an F30 when I don't need manual modes, and bought the E900 for those moments where I want full manual and/or raw format shooting.

Biggest plus of the F30 and E900 (as many have commented on) is the for compact cameras superior image quality. Since dpreview didn't do an in-depth review of the E900, here's my subjective opinion of image quality. Compared to the F30 and S6000 with 6MP on a 1/1.7" CCD, cramming 9MP into a 1/1.6" CCD in the E900 is slight disadvantage, especially in low light situations, and sometimes in terms of dynamic range even in well lit situations.

Overall, I think F30 and S6000 gives slighly better quality images in most shooting conditions, but among cameras with manual mode, E900 beats the Canon's (even s80 at iso200 and above) and I believe justy about any other brand compact camera.
I do a significant amount of indoor shooting, and most often the light is too dim to get good results with other brand compacts, but E900 (and F30) work well here. So well that it often means I don;t need to bring a bulky DSLR (we use an Fuji S2, Canon EOS 350 and 400).

Problems: The clunky user interface makes it so slow to change settings that
one easily misses out on action shots. On the other hand the default automatic mode is pretty good, so it's ok for people who don't want to fiddle with settings all the time. (but in this case consider buying an f30)

Likewise, the file recording time when shooting raw is very long, about 4s. I'm shooting a lot of stationary scenes, and while the slow writes are are no catastophy in this case, it makes a shooting session take much longer. (AFAIK even the S2,S3, S5 take very long to store raw images, but at least on these there is a built in buffer to fill, so one only have to wait if the buffer is full)

Overall auto focus works ok (in some sets I've had fewer bad shoots with the Fuji compact than the Canon DSLR's), but focus fails on some moving subjects.

The manual focus feature is pretty useless or at least hard to use, as there is neither a visual zoom feature, nor a focus distance indicator. (by contrast on a Pentax optio555 compact I have, I can first auto-focus, then see a scale and move focus back and forth proportional to the scale, or I can to some extent see depth of focus by zooming the liveview on the digital display. E900 has none of these aids)

Now in summary, I'm willing to put up with these problems for the image quailty the Fuji gives, and do not regret the purchase.

Note that the E900 is pretty cheap now. Fuji might be dumping rest stock. I bought mine for CAD 229.

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Opinion: I’m using E900 for 5 months now.
I wanted pocket size camera that can be use point-and-shoot, but also can make advanced amateur photographs when I have time and will to do so.

It is exactly what I expected, and a little bit more.

What I liked:
Very fast and reliable, good battery efficiency, natural or very slightly adjusted colors, fast zoom, wide angle lens, live histogram (can be very useful).
Impressive night photographs with very low noise, really amazing for this class of camera.

What I did not liked:
Need some time to get just to menu, viewfinder could be better.
It would be great if this camera has AF assist light.

This camera can produce very good results, if you know what you are doing.

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Opinion: For my semi-pro work, I use a Nikon D100 and D80, with a full camera bag of equipment. Other than that I've been using this E900 for a number of months in situations and places that I'd rather not lug a large bulky camera bag. I have been very, very happy with the E900's results and continued to buy more and more xD 1G cards. Nice for movies - which of course my Nikons don't take. I was particularly impressed by the E900's excellent low-light abilities, as I prefer the challenges and effects such photography affords. I also came to be impressed by the E900's over-all results and found myself using it in a wide variety of circumstances. I felt so confident with it that I swore I was going to take ONLY it on my next trip.

I soon came upon an opportunity to visit South Korea for two weeks, on study grant at Korea University. I immediately felt great relief in having the E900, for it would save me the lugging of my D100 & flash. The results of that trip are noted below...

My rating is based on my experience before my trip to Korea.

Problems: To make this short, once in Korea I found myself having the same disappointing results as another recent visitor's review. The problem started out slowly, with shots occasionally showing bright horizontal lines through the whole picture. Not long after, every single picture had the same lines. I returned from Korea with 3 1G cards filled with the same multi-banded while lines through the pictures. I barely had a dozen pictures worth saving.

I'm now having problems getting my dealer or Fuji to do anything about this.

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