New imaging goodies

The Fuji S3 Pro seemed to have taken a price hit in Canada last week. About two weeks ago I returned a Fuji S3 Pro to a local camera store at $2650 plus GST. Today I checked and Camera Canada and found the camera available for just $2351.60 plus GST including the Hyper Utility software. One could go to McBain Camera and get it price matched at below McBain's cost. Don't worry . . . they'll have to clear it out sometime. Beware - the reason why I returned the camera was because I wished to use it as a JPEG camera. However, with the original firmware, the camera has really awful auto white balance and if you wish to derive any benefit from the new secondary sensor set for increased dynamic range, the buffer depth drops to three shots in RAW and since the camera doesn't compress the RAW files, even a 45x memory card takes about ten two twelve seconds to write. The camera also seems to have focusing problems. The new firmware requires an optional $80 adapter to flash. This adapter, or any Fuji variants of this adapter, are unavailable anywhere in stock locally and would have to be special ordered. Without the adapter and firmware upgrade, anyone who needs to shoot more than about�10FPM (that's frames per *MINUTE*) hopefully brings a grey card with them and white balance�every shot. Better to bring a light meter as well�as metering on the S3 Pro can be a bit wonky at times with the original firmware.

I grabbed a couple of Kingston 2GB�Elite Pro compact flash cards for about $145 each�plus about $5 of shipping the other day. They are 50x cards and perform a tad bit faster than the Transcend 45x cards that I was running with earlier with the D2X. I haven't performed extensive tests on it with any other digital camera. These cards feature a lifetime warranty whereas the $210 Transcend cards don't. Furthermore, locally, even the cheapest 2gig compact flash cards are selling for over $200 and they are 4x cards by Sandisk (blue and red label). If you need these cards and don't know where to find them in Canada for a decent price feel free to e-mail me as my supplier can drop ship anywhere in Canada for about $5 for this card.

Posted by Klyment Tan in Equipment at 17:56 | Comments (11) | Trackbacks (0)
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Apparently Galaxy Camera in Ottawa is selling the S3 Pro for $2299 as you'll see in this thread: http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/read.asp?forum=1020&message=15293928 I think Galaxy's site is at http://www.galaxycamera.com/ but there seems to be something wrong with it. You can do a Google search and find their contact info: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=Galaxy+Camera+Ottawa And, if you're in Edmonton, get it price matched.

#1 K on 2005-10-07 00:16 (Reply)

Wow... what a bummer for Fuji! The S2 is a staple... you'de think they'de get the major bugs worked out before they release something on the market! RAW editing has it's advantages, but you sure spend a lot of time in post-production... JPEG is such a time saver and it's good for 90% of the shots you could ever need to take. Well, that expensive Canon lens set of mine keeps me from being tempted by these other choices...

#2 Joe Zasada (Homepage) on 2005-10-10 01:29 (Reply)

Hahah, yeah . . . a real disappointment regarding the S3 Pro . . . and you know how much of a Fuji fanatic I am. WRT RAW, I just tried PhaseOne's Capture One again for the first time in about a year and for the first time ever as what would technically be considered my "professional photographic" career. I discovered that when shooting RAW, the workflow is actually wayyy smoother than shooting JPEG and stuff does look a lot cleaner. I can't believe what I was missing by using RawShooter Essentials . . . Capture One Pro's noise suppression is incredible as are its sharpening algorithms. The "optimal" area of the detail/noise continuum is so much wider in C1 than in any other RAW converter I have ever used for Fuji S2 Pro, S3 Pro, or D2X RAW files. Responsiveness is faster than RSE though the conversions take longer but you put everything into the batch queue anyway and just keep tuning so it's no problem. And the color controls and curve controls are incredible . . . much nicer than what is available in Nikon Capture (which is practical unusable due to how slow it is) or ACR. RSE doesn't even have most of these colour controls and no curve controls. At 500euros it's not cheap but it's worth every penny. I'll have a full entry about it later.

#2.1 K on 2005-10-10 02:23 (Reply)

yeah, RSE is OK but it is slow-going. (still great for a freebie). Canons RAW conversion software is pretty LAME, just like Nikon's. I've heard good things about C1 but haven't tried it yet. I tend to stick to JPEG as to not slow down my workflow. The exception is probably the little bit of astrophotography that I do; that's about it. Once RAW becomes more integrated into photoshop and windows (and once I get into the really big CF cards) I'll probably start using it more.

#2.1.1 Joe Zasada (Homepage) on 2005-10-10 19:07 (Reply)

You found RSE slow? RSE is probably the fastest RAW converter I've ever used though the interface will lag down a bit when compared to Phase One's Capture One Pro but the interface is still A LOT faster than the Canon and Nikon offerings and even ACR in CS and CS2 and the RAW conversion is even more drastically faster than interface. Man . . . how much compact flash space do you need? =P Dunno if you saw my note for the $145 2gig high speed cards. With the D2X I get about 160-200 compressed RAWs on a card. You should be getting about 250-300 on the same card with the 20D. Why do you need better Photoshop RAW integration?

#2.1.1.1 K on 2005-10-10 23:24 (Reply)

RSE is fast. I meant that RAW processing in general is slow. RSE works great with the batch processing stuff... I don't know, maybe I'm lazy so I stick to JPEG. I'm shooting with three 1GB 45X cards. When I shoot weddings or sports, the two things I shoot the most, I tend to overshoot things a bit. then I gotta spend forever sorting out the crap. different than the film days, that's for sure.. but I get a lot more really good shots and at a higher rate than ever before. the three cards are more than plently when I use JPEG. RAW mode doesn't give me the buffer space for sports... But when I shoot portaits, or landscapes, or lowlight, RAW is the way I go... RSE is great for doing large amounts of RAW processing, but for some reason I like the images I get from photoshop RAW better. Probably because I'm more likely to fine-tune things after the RAW conversion in PS than when I do it in RSE... (once again I'm lazy...)

#2.1.1.1.1 Joe Zasada (Homepage) on 2005-10-12 00:48 (Reply)

Ah, I see . . . fair enough. =) If you get the chance, try C1 Pro again. I'm still finding that it has sped things up for me a lot. I shoot a fair bit of live theatre which I believe is a lot like shooting sportsand sometimes I overshoot as well since it's hard to buffer out with the D2X since the write speeds are nice and the buffer is big. You're going to have to go through the photos anyway and sort out the stuff that you don't want but what I've been finding is that somehow, C1 settings carry over from photo to photo much more easily and with less or no adjustment especially when compared to RSE where you have to tune every single photo. The results that I've gotten from C1 exceed the quality that I've been able to pull out of Photoshop. FUrthermore, for the S3 Pro RAWs in really awful lighting conditions I found that these RAWs don't process properly in Photoshop ACR and the FUji converter doesn't give you enough control and softens stuff up without any way to reduce the effect. C1 Pro gives you more control than ACR while running way faster than ACR and without the strange artifacts associated with ACR processing a SuperCCD HR II (?) RAW.

#2.1.1.1.1.1 K on 2005-10-12 01:00 (Reply)

I see what you mean. I tried the C1 demo; the setting carry over thing is very nice. The tethered shooting would be very handy in a studio... and the white balance control is good. The noise reduction and sharpening stuff seems weird on my 20D, though. (Mind you, for sharpening, I got a script for PS that does the 20D perfectly, it's hard to beat that) Noise Ninja is still king, and the NR in CS2 is very usable. What I need is a combination of C1, RSE, and Photoshop. The new commercial version of RSE is probably going to be the thing... Lots of ways to do the same thing...

#2.1.1.1.1.1.1 Joe Zasada (Homepage) on 2005-10-13 00:16 (Reply)

Yeah, you lucky Canon users get to use C1 tethered. It's way nicer than the tethered software offered by Nikon, Canon or Fuji. About as nice as the Imacon software but Leaf still has nicer . . . but only for Mac. =( Play around with sharpening and noise reduction a bit more . . . Noise Ninja was nice but it isn't quite as nice as C1. It's more customizable . . . and is something that you can always run after RAW conversion if you like. Same as sharpening if you really want to but I found sharpening to work great with C1 . . . the detail extraction is amazing - just used it on the D2X files to create printable copies of 20 x 30" graduation class composites. =)

#2.1.1.1.1.1.1.1 K on 2005-10-13 01:27 (Reply)

The tethered shooting is nice. RSE does let you copy the chosen settings for one image to several simoultaneously, though. The biggest thing against C1 is the cost. A tad steep, especially when put alongside RSE. It's targetted to more of the medium format / digital back crowd; someone that can afford a digital back would consider this pocket change. RSE is so close, the commercial version that's due out soon has gotta be a killer app. Time will tell; C1 is pretty slick though.

#3 Joe Zasada (Homepage) on 2005-10-14 00:09 (Reply)

There's C1 LE or SE or something like that that doesn't have tethered shooting, rotation/cropping, and something else but kept a lot of the functionality of C1 except for license transferrability between platforms and some other seemingly-trivial stuff and and I think that it's only 100euros.

Who knows how much Rawshooter's commercial edition will be, though. Plus C1 doesn't skimp out on the colour controls with their non-pro release. To me, it seems like Rawshooter has no intention of adding these other colour tuning thingies. Or maybe I'm one of the few that sees the value of these controls because of how crappy the light is that I get to work with all of the time and my refusal to use TTL flash whenever possible. =P

#3.1 K on 2005-10-14 00:18 (Reply)

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