Fuji FinePix S9100
Digital Camera Review
Sep 27, 2006
- By Richard Baguley
An update of the venerable (well, venerable in the digital camera industry, at least) FinePix S9000, the S9100 has enough features to confuse a Ph.D. student. For starters, there’s a 10.7X optical zoom, a 9 megapixel sensor that uses Fuji’s Real Photo technology, a flip-out 2-inch LCD screen, plus picture stabilization and an intelligent flash system which Fuji claims more intelligently balances the flash output with ambient light. There are also dual CompactFlash and xD-Picture Card slots. It’s all built around a 9 megapixel Super CCD HR Image sensor in a case that has the look and feel of an SLR camera, but has a non-removable lens. One thing to note: the S9100 is known as the S9600 outside of the US, where our images were taken at the Photokina show in Cologne, Germany. So we didn’t get out models confused: we just traveled a bit to get them.
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Auto Mode
Unsurprisingly, the full auto mode does what you’d expect: fully automate the photo taking process and blocking out many of the on-screen menu options (such as white balance, ISO sensitivity, etc). It also pops up the flash when the camera decides it needs it without warning.
Custom Image Presets
Five scene modes are available: picture stabilization (which prioritizes for shutter speed to reduce camera shake), Natural light (which disables the flash and increases the ISO sensitivity), Portrait (which enables red-eye reduction on the flash when in use), landscape and night. The latter allows for shutter speeds of up to 4 seconds.
Movie Mode
Movies can be captured at 30 frames per second at a resolution of 640 by 480 or 320 by 240 pixels. Mono sound from the microphone on the left side of the case is also captured, but there is no microphone on the front of the camera. This is really only suitable for recording a narration to the movie: not the sound of the subjects themselves.
Drive / Burst Mode
The shooting mode button on the top of the camera allows you to set the continuous shooting mode to Top 4 Frame (which records the first 4 frames it takes), auto bracketing (which captures three images with different exposure settings), Final 4 Frame (which keeps only the final 4 frames captured) and long-period continuous shooting, which allows you to take up to 40 shots at a maximum speed of 1.1 frames per second. The other modes have a maximum frame rate of 1.5 frames per second.
Playback Mode
The playback mode provides all of the functions you would expect to see, from 9-image index views to the ability to sort images by date and sequentially. You can zoom in up to 5.5x on recorded images: enough to see fine detail and check focus.