Fujifilm FinePix S5000 Zoom review: Page 8. Timing & Performance [Digital Photography Review]

Timing & Performance

The S5000's big zoom lens slows startup to a to-be-expected four seconds, switching modes and browsing images is very quick with almost no real delay. Auto focus acceptable in good light when you're looking at around one second AF lag at wide angle, that is doubled at telephoto. I was very disappointed however with the S5000's Half to Full-press shutter lag which was a remarkably slow 0.3 seconds (most modern digital cameras don't take longer than 0.1 seconds). Shot to shot times were very good (just over a second). Overall a mixed bag.

Timing Notes

All times calculated as an average of three operations. Unless otherwise stated all timings were made on a 6mp (2816 x 2120) JPEG image (approx. 1,500 KB per image). The media used for all the tests on this page was a 128 MB Fujifilm xD-Picture Card.

Action	Details	Time, seconds
Power: Off to Record	Lens extension	4.1
Power: Off to Play	Image displayed	1.5
Power: Record to Off	Lens extended	3.5
Power: Play to Off	Lens already retracted	0.5

Mode: Record to Play	Image displayed	1.1
Mode: Play to Record	Lens already extended	2.2

Play: Magnify	To 18x magnification	5.8
Play: Thumbnail view	3x3 index, 9 images	0.5

Action	Details	Time, seconds
Zoom from Wide to Tele	Full zoom from 37 to 370 mm (10 x)	2.5
Half-press Lag (0->S1)	Wide angle (Multi/Center AF Area)	1.0 - 1.2
Half-press Lag (0->S1)	Telephoto (Multi/Center AF Area)	2.1 - 2.3
Half to Full-press Lag (S1->S2)	Wide angle (Electronic Viewfinder)	0.3
Half to Full-press Lag (S1->S2)	Wide angle (LCD Monitor)	0.3
Full-press Lag (0->S2)	Wide angle	0.7
Off to Shot Taken	Wide angle	4.3
Shot to Shot	Wide angle	1.1

Continuous mode

The table below shows the results of our continuous shooting test, indicating the actual frame rate along with maximum number of frames and how long you would have to wait after taking the maximum number of frames before you could take another shot.

Image Type	Frames per sec	Max no. of frames *1	Time to store after last frame *2
Top-5 (6M / 3M / 2M)	4.2 fps	5	4.0 sec
Last-5 (6M / 3M / 2M)	4.2 fps	5	4.0 sec
Long Period (1280 x 960)	1.8 fps	40	0.8 sec

*1	In a single "burst" (finger held down on shutter release)
*2	The S5000 won't let you take the next burst of shots until the currently buffered burst has been written to the xD card. This timing is from the display showing 'Storing' to the live view returning.

Just like the FinePix F700 we found the S5000's continuous shooting to be slower than specified by Fujifilm, they rate the burst speed as five frames a second, our tests were consitently 4.2 (actually 4.1666667) frames per second. Just like the F700 the S5000 does not blank out the LCD during continuous shooting, it continues to provide a display of the scene (either live or the briefly shot just taken).

File Write / Display and Sizes

Timings shown below are the time taken for the camera to process and "flush" the image out to the storage card, the timer was started as soon as the shutter release was pressed and stopped when activity indicator LED beside the viewfinder stopped blinking. This means the timings also include the cameras processing time and as such are more representative of the actual time to "complete the task".

Image Type	Time to write (secs)	Time to display (secs)	File size *1 (approx.)	Images on a *2 128 MB xD
6M (2816 x 2120)	2.0	0.8	1,500 KB	86
3M (2048 x 1536)	1.5	<0.5	850 KB	162
2M (1600 x 1200)	1.2	<0.5	620 KB	204
1M (1280 x 960)	1.2	<0.5	470 KB	275

All file sizes are an average of three files. As is the case with JPEG it's difficult to predict the size of an image because it will vary a fair amount depending on the content of the image (especially the amount of detail captured). For example, take a photograph of a fairly empty wall and you'll get a small JPEG, take a photograph of a bush with a lot of detail and you'll get a larger image. File sizes here are closer to the later, the larger size of file you should expect.

Camera estimation.

As you can see the S5000 had very short processing and write times, taking just two seconds from shutter release to the image being written to the xD card for the largest 6M (2816 x 2120) image size. Kudos Fujifilm.

Low Light Auto Focus

This test is designed to measure the minimum amount of light under which the camera can still focus. The focus target is our lens distortion test chart (shown here on the right), camera is positioned exactly 2 m (6.6 ft) away.

Light levels are gradually dropped until the camera can no longer focus. This is carried out at both wide angle and telephoto zoom positions (as more light reaches the focusing systems with a larger aperture).

This test target is the optimum type of subject for most "contrast detect" AF systems (as it has a vertical line at its center), you should consider the results below the best you could expect to achieve.

Lens position	Aperture	Lowest light focus
Wide angle (37 mm equiv.)	F2.8	Complete darkness
Telephoto (370 mm equiv.)	F3.2	Complete darkness

Light intensity (Lux) = 2.5 x 2^EV (@ ISO 100), 10.76391 Lux = 1 foot-candle (fc)

The S5000 Zoom appears to use the same green LED AF assist lamp as the F700, however on the S5000 it did seem to work notably better. The S5000 appears to have a larger lens over the LED and produced a brighter light which was better concentrated around the center of the frame. This meant that the camera could focus in complete darkness at both wide angle and telephoto.

Battery life

We ran the camera through our new battery life test. This test is designed to be fair and comparative to each camera and battery type:

Take 4 shots without flash
Wait 2 minutes (50% of the time powering the camera off)
Take 1 shot with flash
Wait 1 minute
Repeat

Batteries are fully discharged and recharged before the test and all cameras were reset to their factory default settings. Here are the results:

The Fujifilm FinePix S5000 Zoom lasted longer than any other camera tested to date, an amazing five and a half hours on a set of 1600 mAh AA batteries. Considering that these batteries are now showing their age (2300 mAh batteries are available) you could easily expect more than that in real life. Kudos.