Fuji F810

[Jetsam]

Has anyone had any first hand experience with Fuji's finepix F810 and underwater housing?

What does it perform like,any oddities.....etc.

Thanks in advance.

[MATTBIN]

We have a couple of land based Fuji FinePix cameras (both 6Mp) one shaped like and behaves like an SLRthe other more compact, unfortunately we waited more than a nan-second so couldnt get a housing. They both perform very well, much better than I expected, almost up to my old 35mm for quality.
Only criticism is the time lag between shutter release and image captuer, useless for moving subjects. Test that out first.

Matt

[abucksdiver]

I have an F810, but don't have an underwater housing (yet )
I agree with Matts comments about the delay between shutter release and image capture, although shutter priority does help a little (as does pre-focusing)

Andrew

[Jetsam]

Hmmm..............i've heard,according to the brochure the shutter lag for the F810 is only 0.05 of a second,thats not slow!

[abucksdiver]

I think that might be in "ideal" situations....

[MATTBIN]

Test it for yourself and see what YOU think of it, brochures - pah all fabrication

Matt

[Jetsam]

Well,my "ideal" situation would be to turn all the crap off and tell the camera what to do,not vice-versa !!

Bah!! Bring back the box brownie !

Thanks for the replies though.

[onthetrain]

Originally Posted by Jetsam

Has anyone had any first hand experience with Fuji's finepix F810 and underwater housing?

What does it perform like,any oddities.....etc.

Thanks in advance.

I'll qualify this comment by saying I know squat about cameras, digital or otherwise. However......

At Lids I was talking to the guys on the Fuji stall about which Digital camera to buy. They cautioned against the 810 and advised me to buy the F700. The F700 bundle was about £150 cheaper.

Now we are talking a 2Mpixel difference BUT...... Matey said the lens on the F700 is far superior the lens on the 810 is inferior because they were trying to keep the cost down and most people go for max pixels at the expense of anything else.

Hope that helps

Alan

[Jetsam]

Originally Posted by onthetrain

At Lids I was talking to the guys on the Fuji stall about which Digital camera to buy. They cautioned against the 810 and advised me to buy the F700. The F700 bundle was about £150 cheaper

Yeah,i was there and got the same talk,Yes the F700 has the double CCD sensor with the S and R pixels,which give better highlight detail.Yes it has a slightly higher quality lens,but they said if you enlarge A3 or bigger then the 810 will give a better quality result.So in extremes it's not as good,despite the better lens and double CCD.The F700 does not focus as close in macro either,it's not a lot,but it may be useful.Looking at the chip sensitivity the F700 gives equivalent 160 ASA/ISO while the F810 gives 80ASA/ISO equivalent.In theory the chip in the F810 should suffer from less noise in the blacks,it's something i really need to be able to compare myself rather than listening to a salesman!! After all they admitted to me that they had bought all the stocks of F700's from Japan,about 600 units.Now this could show great faith in the product,or they could be pushing it so they don't get left with all of them!! After all why is it a lot cheaper,if it really really was that good they could keep the price the same....surely?

That may just be the cynic in me however.

At the end of the day,i'm not looking for an image i can sell,and i know i can get better images than the vast majority of digital underwater users. But i want the versatility of manual control and RAW files while not having to have the vast bulk like an SLR set up.

I would like to field test both and choose,but that's not feasable,the F810 does'nt seem to have any major faults and it is the newer camera and will have the newer backup.I think i will get pretty good results on it with a bit of fine tuning,so i should be happy.

Time will tell i'm sure.

EDIT: The price is actually irrelevant to me,i can get an F810 and housing for about £25-£28 more than the F700 show package price,so it's not such a big deal price wise.

[Tim Ingmire]

Take a look over on www.digitaldiver.net a number of people over there have bought the 810. From the specs it looks like a more than decent camera and very expandable with lens and strobes.

Looks like a good buy for the price.