Compared to the Nikon Coolpix 990

As I didn't have any other six megapixel compact digital cameras hanging around (wink) I decided to compare the 6800Z in three megapixel mode against the benchmark compact 3 megapixel Nikon's Coolpix 990. The 6800Z was set to 3 Megapixel, Fine, the Coolpix 990 was set to FINE JPEG.

Some crops below are of an 120 x 90 area of the image magnified 200%, some are straight 240 x 180 crops. Lighting - 2 x 800W studio lights with dichroic daylight filters bounced off a white overhead reflector (about as close as you can get to "indoor daylight").

Fujifilm FinePix 6800Z	Nikon Coolpix 990
Fujifilm FinePix 6800Z	Nikon Coolpix 990
Fujifilm FinePix 6800Z	Nikon Coolpix 990

First thing that's obvious is that the 6800Z's colours are far more saturated and definitely more accurate, after that things get a little more complicated. Clearly the 6800Z is better at resolving "certain types of detail" but that it's certainly not a giant leap better than the Coolpix 990, indeed in some situations the image quality is decidedly inferior. Is SuperCCD considerably better than it's square pixel counterparts? Not in this reviewers eyes...

Fujifilm 6800Z 6 megapixels vs. Photoshop 6 megapixels

I thought this may be an interesting experiment which may at least spark some discussion over exactly how Fujifilm are generating a 6 megapixel image from the 3.3 megapixel SuperCCD. Below we have two images available, the first is the exact same scene used for the comparison above but shot at 6M Fine direct from the 6800Z, the second is the 3M image from the 6800Z interpolated to 6 megapixels by Photoshop (simple bicubic resample). Just for comparison...

Download: Fujifilm 6800Z 6 megapixel image / Photoshop 6 megapixel image (from 3 megapixel). Crops below are from a 240 x 90 section of each image magnified 200% (nearest neighbour).

6800Z 6 megapixel image

6800Z 3 megapixel image resampled to 6 megapixels by Photoshop (bicubic)

6800Z 6 megapixel image

6800Z 3 megapixel image resampled to 6 megapixels by Photoshop (bicubic)

6800Z 6 megapixel image

6800Z 3 megapixel image resampled to 6 megapixels by Photoshop (bicubic)

6800Z 6 megapixel image

6800Z 3 megapixel image resampled to 6 megapixels by Photoshop (bicubic)

This isn't a definitive test of the methods used by Fujifilm, and to be fair to the method involved here the 6800Z would always have the advantage as it has a RAW image file to play with and can apply algorithms such as sharpening AFTER processing the image, what this simple example goes to show is that there is simply NO MORE image information visible in the 6 megapixel image than in the 3 megapixel image.