Image Quality
Overall image quality was very
good, resolution is high and colour balance is excellent (in fact
colours are this cameras strong point, it laps up skin tones and
loves bright colours. It has the same strange noise artifacts
I found on the MX2700 although they do seem to be slightly less.
I'm very happy with the images
in the samples gallery and I feel they are the best way for you
to judge the image quality for yourself.
Artifacts
Although the MX2900 boasts higher resolution of 2.16
megapixels (effective) I'm still not convinced that
it has any benefit over the lesser resolution CCD's
of the Coolpix 950 or Oly C2000Z. The MX2900 suffers
from the same flat colour noise and artifacts seen
on the MX2700 (close-up) and definition of fine details
can someitmes be affected by this.
The crop shown right highlights an example of this
problem, you'll find other examples of this flat-colour
noise in the examples on the previous page.
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That said, this
crop is a good example of good definition (in good light)
and overall good image quality from the MX2900 (it's just
not _quite_ good enough). |
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Compared to the Nikon Coolpix 950
The side-by-side image comparisons below compares
the performance of the MX2900 to that of the Nikon Coolpix 950
taking a shot of a standard test poster. Both shots were taken
within minutes of each other, same lighting (natural light through
window about 11EV) two sets of samples were taken the first in
FINE JPEG mode (around 800KB for both cameras) the second in each
cameras TIFF mode. Note that the MX2900 has a slight border top
and bottom because of its additional 200 pixel resolution.
A 200% blown-up crop of the image is shown below
each thumbnail to give an immediate comparison of exposure accuracy,
colour accuracy and sharpness. The sharpening setting on the MX2900
was set to the mid-point. You can click on the thumbnail to download
the original image (warning.. the TIFF files are VERY large and
on a slow modem will take several minutes to download).
Fuji MX2900
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Nikon Coolpix 950
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JPEG FINE, 823KB
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JPEG FINE, 770KB
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Cropped and blown-up 200%
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Cropped and blown-up 200%
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Fuji MX2900
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Nikon Coolpix 950
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Hi TIFF, 4258KB
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HI TIFF, 5633KB
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Cropped and blown-up 200%
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Cropped and blown-up 200%
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My general conclusion from this simple test is
that although the MX2900 appears slightly sharper this is down
to the in-camera sharpening which also produces the unfortunate
white halo around contrast areas (such as the figures on the clock
face above). Overall the Coolpix 950 seems to win out with more
natural colours, better dynamic range and no visible artifacts.
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Oct 28, 1999
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Aug 24, 1999
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Oct 9, 2002
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Oct 7, 2002
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