I bought this camera as an open box discount through Amazon for about $177, to replace my trusty F30.
I've been trying to get to know this camera and decide whether my photo quality has improved over the F30.
Disappointments:
1) the 'boot up' time is long, something like 7 seconds. You see a EXR splash screen during this time. If you see something happening and need to quickly take a picture, you might miss it. My F30 was ready to use faster.
2) No paper manual. The little booklet that is included has pages of the usual 'cover my behind' general safety warnings like ground your rooftop antenna, don't electrocute yourself in a bathtub, and don't cover the fan motor ventilation holes, all which have nothing to do with a camera. The useful information actually about the camera is very limited. Why not put the useless safety warnings on the CD and put the camera information on the booklet? In my opinion, this sort of penny pinching is really irritating. Scrolling through a 128 page PDF file on a disk is not a good way to learn how to use a new camera. You should be able to go out a few days with the manual and try different settings based on the manual and see how the camera responds. Bad move Fuji.
3) battery is 1000mAh, and doesn't seem to last very long on a charge. My F30 had a bigger battery that I could use for days on a charge, and the F30 charged in the camera with a plug in adaptor. The user manual describes (badly) several power modes but never mentions which of them gives you the most power savings (like 'clear display", which I'm guessing uses more power, but they don't really tell you how each setting effects power drain). There is a little flip open door on the corner of the camera that is a bit of a mystery. Apparently there is some battery shaped accessory that you can insert and run the camera off an external power supply, but why not just put in a power outlet for internal battery charging or outside power? Or document the little door thing better?
4) no optical viewfinder (which my old F700 had but the F30 was missing). This is really useful on super bright days.
5) natural light setting is not as useful as old F30. With the F30, if I put the camera on Natural Light, I could go in to a dimly lit restaurant or house and a high percentage of my shots would be usable. Those that were usable had low noise and smooth appearance, usually. With the F80, this setting produces noisier images. I'm still experimenting to try to get better results, but I really miss having a general setting that gave pretty good results without manually adjusting the dynamic range and maximum ISO. To be a great point and shoot, you really need one reliable setting that you can turn on quickly and get to work when circumstances don't allow a lot of futzing around.
6) No "museum mode". The F30 had this useful setting that let you quickly suppress all sounds and flash, for times when you don't want to disturb others or make others aware that you are doing photography. The F80 lets you accomplish exactly the same thing, but in more steps and futzing around.
7) The manual (the 128 page PDF file on the disk) just does not provide enough information on when you would actually use some of the features, when they are most appropriate. I wish they had a one page cheat sheet with recommended settings for various situations, that could fit in a wallet or camera case, like when shooting in P mode is advantageous, etc., or the image degradation at 12 MP versus at 5MP (5MP settings actually improve image quality in some of the modes because of the way that pixels are combined for dynamic range). I'm still trying to figure optimum settings, but I wish they had some advice based on real world experiments that would show the optimum settings.
8) purple fringing in super contrast conditions (like shooting inside a room, and having a bright window in the scene). But in normal scenes, it isn't often a problem.
Good stuff, improvements, things that will make you happy:
1) the screen is really big and nice. A bit crowded with icons for all the gizmo info (which you can turn off) but nice to use.
2) the dynamic range settings are very useful. For landscape photos with bright light and heavy shadows, you can use up to 800% (provided you don't use one of the film simulations). But you have to turn that down to 100% for indoor/low light circumstances, or images will be pretty noisy.
3) control over maximum ISO is very useful, but not well explained in the manual.
4) zoom is pretty good, a nice range, and with the image stabilization, I've had some clear shots at maximum zoom without a support, in daylight.
5) auto rotate of photos in display mode. Improvement over my F30.
6) movie HD mode is pretty good.
7) face detection is pretty good
8) focus tracking (when turned on) is pretty good, but seems to eat the battery, so I usually leave it off.
9) the pro low light mode, where it takes 4 shots and combines them, is useful and works pretty well.
10) SD card instead of XD. I had no beef with the XD format, but it never caught on and the XD capacity never kept up with the SDHC. I'm glad they switched to the standard.
11) Fill flash often works better. Occasionally it give out some washed out near objects, but usually it produces a well blended and not very noticeable fill flash, better than older models.
12) Faster response (except at boot up, when you have to wait 7 seconds). The auto focus and exposure is faster, and the lag when you press the shutter is smaller, so you don't miss as many shots.
This camera is capable of quality existing light photography, but you have to spend more time setting things up and experimenting to get there. If you can limit the ISO to 800, the splotchiness and water-color smearing (in Natural Light setting) can be minimized. I'll probably get the broken shutter button on my old F30 repaired so I can still have a no-brainer low light camera on the ready, but I'll keep trying to fine tune the settings with the F80 to minimize the problems with some of the low light modes. This camera has taken some outstanding photos, but I still have a higher percentage of bad existing light photos, and I know that I'll have to experiment a lot more to find all the setting combinations that must be eliminated. In general, use this as a 5 MP camera and not a 12 MP camera, and you are halfway there to okay existing light photos. Turn off the expanded dynamic range stuff when shooting inside. Use the P mode with custom settings rather than some of the automatic settings.
I have a feeling that a firmware upgrade could improve the way this camera operates: they should really use the F30 and F31FD as the standard for existing light photos and provide a setting that gives equivalent point and shoot ease in difficult light.
It is a good camera but it really needs someone to publish a good optimization chart to show the best setting for various conditions.
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Update, 10-6-2010
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I've continued to experiment with lighting situations that gave older digital cameras a rough time, and tried to get better results under conditions that initially produced mediocre results.
1) for outdoor shooting with bright direct sunlight and a lot of deep shadows (example, our country road at noon with lots of shade under trees), the EXR DR mode with film type set to standard and dynamic range set to 800 produces good results with the resolution in the M (medium 6mp range). The bright areas and deep shadows retain detail.
You will also notice that it will do macro close up shots without manually selecting the macro flower icon (but this is not true in all modes).
2) Use the P for lots of other conditions and take advantage of the exposure compensation control. Set the DR to 400 for bright light with mixed medium range subjects, and maybe to 200 for people, and the ISO at 400 if you can get away with it or 800 if you are doing more telephoto and need the shutter speed forced faster.
3) low light with no flash, the P mode at DR 100 and M resolution with ISO 1600 sometimes gives better results than using N mode.
4) in P mode, I find setting the exposure compensation a half stop or third stop down reduced the overexposed look of some photos in blindingly bright sunlight.
5) the Pro Low Light mode that takes multiple exposures and combines them is actually pretty useful, especially if you have a monopod or some way to stabilize the camera in really low light. I've taken some photos after sunset that have beautiful detail and no noticeable noise. Also, some 'time lapse' ghost images of moving subjects, for fun.
6) the sunset SP mode in twilight, even if you are not photographing a sunset, can produce some saturated and well exposed low light shots, and I sometimes switch over to this mode in low light to see how the results compare to the natural light or P mode with DR at 100.
I think the people who returned their cameras after being disappointed didn't take time to do enough experiments. I still wish the N mode in this camera was more like the F30's N mode, but I think I can get similar results or better if I take the time to set things up.
I bought 4 extra NP50 batteries and have decided to just be prepared for the inevitable. The face detection should be turned off when there are no faces, to save battery, but you can find generic NP50 batteries for about $4 that seem to work okay, and it is just essential to keep a couple extras charged up and in your pocket if you are shooting for a while. If you need your camera at the ready, you will have to leave it on with the lens out because the boot up time is painfully long and you will miss shots. I hope they improve on this in the future but I'm liking this camera more as I get more familiar with it. I would give it 5 stars if the battery was more substantial, the boot up time was shorter, and the natural light setting was a bit more like the F30 or F31fd. But remember that this camera can do things that the older ones could not do, and the optical zoom is much greater. Get the camera and get extra batteries and a monopod.
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Reviews with images
Ok camera (updated)
I just got the camera but I'm getting some quality problems. I can't tell if these problems are just my camera because there are no images to compare to yet (this EXR model was just released). I can't recommend buying this camera right now even with the hype around EXR - I recommend waiting at least a few weeks until the camera's automatic, indoor and low-light imaging can be tested and reviewed by digicam websites.So far I've experienced grainy (noisy) images even in bright indoor light (see product review images) and I've seen very little difference between SN (high noise EXR), DR (dynamic range EXR), and HR (high resolution) for the same shot.I hear a strong whirring sound during video playback each time I zoomed the camera while recording video. It is strong enough to drown out background noises and is as loud as my voice while recording.All these problems seem to be due to early-stage manufacturing but I will do some more fiddling and research in the next few weeks. For now I absolutely do not recommend this camera.I appreciate Fuji for doing adaptive pixel processing. Some good things about the camera are the zoom lens, the quality and size of the LCD, and the weight and feel of the camera. More to come...(6/2/10 update: Upgraded rating to two stars but I still cannot recommend this camera. The zoom sound is definitely a design flaw. Search the internet for F80EXR videos and you will hear the zoom sound. My wife has an older Nikon P5100 that has no audible whir when zooming during video recording.During a sunny day I have taken good outdoor pictures and video using automatic settings with no graininess. Also, when taking pictures in complete darkness, there are no "dark current" illuminated pixels. Still more to come...).(3/15/11 update: I've upgraded this camera to three stars because of the price. The camera is less than half of when it first came out, so it is ok for the money ($170). I did not like this camera mainly because of the poor low light qualities and the noise when zooming and autofocus during video recording. The EXR sensor doesn't produce pictures with great dynamic range and the colors are a bit off (brown hue). My pictures showing the flaws have been mysteriously removed from this F80EXR page on Amazon, so don't believe the 5 star opinions as if this camera has no problems.
