R4 vs. Fuji F11/F30

To those of you, who own both cameras mentioned above:

What would you prefer buying if you were looking for an allround cam for taking pictures mainly in the evening and night hours?

I find the decision hard because of the following:

The Fujis definitely have the better sensor and manage to get a lot out of low light. On the other hand - if you are looking for really good results the ISO usability does not reach beyond 800 imo. ISO 1600 (or 3200) already show a lot of watercolor effect with only few details left.

The Ricoh produces a lot more noise, but is capable of ISO 800 too. AND it offers the IS on top! I found that especially the IS is missing on the Fuji cams and when I had the opportunity to test the F11 I often encountered some blur due to my lacking ability to hold shutter speeds below 1/15 or so.

Therefore I still ask myself, whether the Ricoh at ISO 800 will not be able to give me even better results after applying Noise Ninja (which I am willing to do). Due to the bult in IS, the Ricoh's ISO 800 might result in more detailed pictures than the Fujis non stabilized ISO 1600, or am I on the wrong track?

BR
zikarus

I do not own any of these cameras, but I'm buying a camera this/next week as well and "in the final round" I took into account Ricoh R4 and Fuji F30, just like you do. I decided to go with R4 due to its zoom (especially wide angle). In my opinion the choice between them is the choice between better zoom and better low light pictures (I don't care about movie mode at all). As daytime outdoor pics are what is most important to me, I think I can live with worse low light pics. But if I needed a camera mainly for evening and night shots I'd choose Fuji without hesitation.

I have both, and use the R4 for daytime and the F11 for indoor and low light. Reading the Fuji forum, it appears that the F30 is even better.

Rube

zikarus said:

To those of you, who own both cameras mentioned above:

What would you prefer buying if you were looking for an allround
cam for taking pictures mainly in the evening and night hours?

Click to expand...

If your main criteria is the image delivered from cropped, non PP, or unresized images at ISO 400 and up then there is no question that the F10/11/30 would be the better choice. Or maybe even DSLR.

What the R4 has over the F series is wide angle, better zoom, and IS. There is the whole IS vs. ISO debate that rages in other forums, but I think you need both. For example, freezing action in a night club is frequently brought up. For this you would need high ISO. But with the highest ISOs available to compact cams, is the light sufficient? Here's a photo I took that has similar lighting to a club environment: http://www.flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=156948198&size=o

I took it at ISO 400 and the shutter speed was 1/3s with no underexposing tricks. The dancers are blurred. With the same exposure at ISO 800, you'd get around 1/6s. ISO 1600 1/12. ISO 3200 1/24. The Fuji shutter speed would be slightly faster with 2.8 aperture vs. 3.3 but not by a whole lot. At 1/24s, I don't know if I'd consider that fast enough to freeze action. Now consider that when I took the photo I was next to a subwoofer that caused a lot of bass vibration. At 1/3s it looks like the IS did it's job by stabilizing the picture based on the static parts of the image: the objects on the opposite wall do not seem blurred. So with a non-stabilized ISO 1600, I think the same shot would give you subject blur and hand shake blur. ISO 3200 may give you a good shot, although too many people have been writing that off. I wouldn't be one of them since I'm not a professional or a serious hobbyist. Anyways, back to the night club shot, the best photos I've seen of those are long exposure with flash (not compact cam flash) or long exposure with no flash.

I don't think that there isn't a perfect compact camera out there and you'll have to sacrifice and compromise on something. Good luck on your decision.

zikarus said:

To those of you, who own both cameras mentioned above:

What would you prefer buying if you were looking for an allround
cam for taking pictures mainly in the evening and night hours?

I find the decision hard because of the following:

The Fujis definitely have the better sensor and manage to get a lot
out of low light. On the other hand - if you are looking for really
good results the ISO usability does not reach beyond 800 imo. ISO
1600 (or 3200) already show a lot of watercolor effect with only
few details left.

The Ricoh produces a lot more noise, but is capable of ISO 800 too.
AND it offers the IS on top! I found that especially the IS is
missing on the Fuji cams and when I had the opportunity to test the
F11 I often encountered some blur due to my lacking ability to hold
shutter speeds below 1/15 or so.

Therefore I still ask myself, whether the Ricoh at ISO 800 will not
be able to give me even better results after applying Noise Ninja
(which I am willing to do). Due to the bult in IS, the Ricoh's ISO
800 might result in more detailed pictures than the Fujis non
stabilized ISO 1600, or am I on the wrong track?

BR
zikarus

Click to expand...

I must admit that I'm impressed with the club picture, I thought that Ricoh would deal worse in this situation. Of course it's not great, but it's ok and I'm surely not going to print party pictures, so that'll do it for me. I suppose you did some ppp apart from resizing it, am I right? Could you please tell me what is your workflow for ppp? I'm new to the digital photography scene and all I know about post production processing is how to remove/reduce noise and sharpen the image using unsharpen mask .

BTW is there a possibility to automate work with Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro (I'd prefer Photoshop)? What I mean is I'd like to be able to choose a set of images (for example a whole folder) and make the program process all of them for example reducing noise, resizing, sharpening and then saving them in a new folder or under new name (with some prefixes or suffixes for example). Thanks for your help in advance.

Ok, I've just read a bit about and tried using actions and batch processing, so now I know how to do it

Thank you for your input!

I am going to decide next week and let you know which way I went...

Batch jobs makes things a lot easier. The workflows I've been playing around with are based on Hugo's from the Fuji forum. Denoise, contrast, saturation, color balance, unsharp sharpen.

Do you use noise reduction provided by Photoshop or do you prefer for example Noise Ninja plugin? I'm asking because when I was toying with actions yesterday I've used Noise Ninja and while it was doing its work there was "using previous image profile" or something similar written there. I'd prefer Noise Ninja to profile each image independently and am curious how to do it.

I use Neat Image for noise reduction and then use Paint Shop Pro X for the rest of the workflow. I'm not sure how the other programs work.

dakeyras said:

Do you use noise reduction provided by Photoshop or do you prefer
for example Noise Ninja plugin? I'm asking because when I was
toying with actions yesterday I've used Noise Ninja and while it
was doing its work there was "using previous image profile" or
something similar written there. I'd prefer Noise Ninja to profile
each image independently and am curious how to do it.

Click to expand...

I know batch processing is possible in Paint Shop Pro, but does Neat Image have this option as well? And if so is it possible to set it so the batch processing would profile ech image independently or even better, find a most suitable profile from its directory?

Neat Image has batch processing. This link has info:
http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/read.asp?forum=1013&message=18743977

dakeyras said:

I know batch processing is possible in Paint Shop Pro, but does
Neat Image have this option as well? And if so is it possible to
set it so the batch processing would profile ech image
independently or even better, find a most suitable profile from its
directory?

Click to expand...

I am using Ninja Noise too and I am very happy with it.

But I do not know exactly about batch operation since I prefer to handle each picture on its own. They all have to be treated individually anyway. At least when it comes down to contrast, saturation or sharpening. Ninja Noise is quite fast so I doubt the advantage of batch handling...

BR
zikarus

dakeyras said:

Do you use noise reduction provided by Photoshop or do you prefer
for example Noise Ninja plugin? I'm asking because when I was
toying with actions yesterday I've used Noise Ninja and while it
was doing its work there was "using previous image profile" or
something similar written there. I'd prefer Noise Ninja to profile
each image independently and am curious how to do it.

Click to expand...

mvph - thanks for your input. BTW do you use the same workflow for all your images or do you have different ones for indoor/outdoor pictures in good/low light conditions?

zikarus - don't doubt it, just try it . For example using Photoshop with Ninja Noise plugin you can select lots of images at once and have them processed (I've toyed with noise reduction-> resizing-> unsharp mask) one by one and saved to the disk while you eat your dinner . Neat Image lets you do the same with noise reduction while profiling each image or selecting the best profile of the ones you have on your computer. As this is the way I use noise reduction (open-> profile image or select best profile-> reduce noise-> save and close) I can see no reason to process each image separately other than a huge waste of time.

Of course, if you want and have the time to process each image individually, then it's ok. But I just want to process all the images I need at once (or at least in a few groups) to get as good pictures as possible this way. Of course, processing each image individually will produce better results, but I have neither the time nor the willingness to do it. It just depends on ones needs .

mvph - is there a way to deal effectively with saturation and color balance using batch processing? I've toyed a bit with ppp today and found out that using Neat Image's batch jobs and after that use batch in Photoshop improving contrast (USM - Amount 20%, Radius 100, Threshold 0), resizing and sharpening (USM - Amount 50%, Radius 1, Threshold 0) I can improve pictures fairly well. But of course I know this is a simple workflow which can be improved. I'd really appreciate any advise as I'm just starting to learn post production processing and this is something I'd like to have automated as much as possible.

Mine's a pretty simple workflow as well. Like you, I'm learning and I try to gather my info from lurking around the other sites. A perfect PP workflow is hard to find since it's a user preference thing--some people prefer that their images look a certain way.

dakeyras said:

mvph - is there a way to deal effectively with saturation and color
balance using batch processing? I've toyed a bit with ppp today and
found out that using Neat Image's batch jobs and after that use
batch in Photoshop improving contrast (USM - Amount 20%, Radius
100, Threshold 0), resizing and sharpening (USM - Amount 50%,
Radius 1, Threshold 0) I can improve pictures fairly well. But of
course I know this is a simple workflow which can be improved. I'd
really appreciate any advise as I'm just starting to learn post
production processing and this is something I'd like to have
automated as much as possible.

Click to expand...

So if Ricoh using new sensor technology which is good in low light, such as Fuji new sensor or Sony new sensor. I think people will choose Ricoh R5

I hope they learn what user wants

...in the end. Mainly because of its (=the F11) - imo - unrivaled resolution.
--
Live and let live...
http://zikarus.funpic.de/album

No matter to model of your choice, good luck to you and have lots of fun!
--
Cheers.............. Rui
http://www.flickr.com/photos/ruinog/

Cheers! You are right: it's still the human mind behind the dc that matters...
--
Live and let live...
http://zikarus.funpic.de/album