Long Exposures

The S1 Pro allows for exposures of up to 30 seconds, as we all know digital camera's aren't very good with long exposures, after a second or two visible noise will normally become a problem.. The only solution so far has been either post-processing noisy images (subtracting the noise) or cooling the CCD (not for the faint hearted). Here we took the S1 Pro out at night specifically to get some long exposure shots.

Thumbnail	100% crop
ISO 320, 2.8 secs, F4.8, 3040 x 2016
ISO 320, 1.4 secs, F4.8, 3040 x 2016
ISO 320, 1/4 secs, F4.8, 3040 x 2016
ISO 1600, 1/7 sec, F4.8, 3040 x 2016

The S1 Pro is cursed (as are most digital cameras) with stuck pixels at long exposures, cooling the camera would have helped (but not something you'd want to do every day). The last crop in the above series shows what looks like pattern noise (noise which shows some type of pattern rather than random "Gaussian noise", pushing a couple of crops from the above images up by a couple of stops (in Photoshop) shows this pattern noise more clearly (as well as stuck pixels):

Hair Moiré

There you go, I've dubbed a new term which we'll no doubt see strewn across our Fuji Talk forum straight after this review, I decided to call it this because that's probably when this problem will be most noticable (although it is there on other subjects, edges of contrasting objects and very fine details, so it's not a "hair thing" ;). You can also see it in the resolution chart on the next page. Although I'm highlighting this it was only visible in around 2% of the images we shot (brightly lit, sharply in focus, very fine details).

I can't tell if this problem is a side effect of aliasing (because of the size of the pixels on the S1's big CCD; although that shouldn't be it because there's supposed to be an anti-aliasing filter there), or of the image processing used on the RAW SuperCCD data. However, it is there, much more visible in 6.1 megapixel images than 3.5 megapixel.

Colour Patches

We've chosen to compare the S1 Pro's colour with three of the best performing digital cameras in our current database.

FujiFilm FinePix S1 Pro	Kodak DCS 620X
Nikon Coolpix 990	Sony DSC-F505V

We're only measuring colour below. RGB values below were taken from a VGA reduced image (to average colours and eliminate JPEG artifacts) using the Eyedropper tool in Photoshop with a 5 by 5 Average Sample Size.