Hi all
Just finished an outing with a good friend of mine who recently purchased a Finepix S5000. It's his first digital experience and he thought he had the world by the tail with it, although he has considerable experience with film and a Super Program. We took a charter boat ride in hopes that it would offer some good photo opportunities. I had planned to take my s404 digital out to make it a digital day, but since I forgot to charge the NiMH batteries the night before that wasn't an option. Since he has an optical 10X zoom on that thing I decided to take my 28-200 Tamron lens on my PZ-1p with 100 ISO film. The lens is not exactly tack sharp for landscape images, but heck, I figured he needed the handicap and it really wasn't my intent to make his new camera look bad. When I first looked through the viewfinder, it was black and he had to push a couple of buttons to get that to work. To my surprise I wasn't looking through any optical lens of any sort, but rather at a smaller digital screen inside the viewfinder. The quality of what I was looking at was so bad I had to really force myself to not say nasty things or make horrible facial expressions. I think I managed an "OH", and that was all I said. Focus and zoom were all push buttons and not on the lens, further yuck! I've heard lots of comments on how small and dark the ZX-M's viewfinder is, well this is about 300% worse! Our charter boats cruising speed was only 5-10 knots, thus it definitely was no speed boat. We had good afternoon shooting light although it was hazy some of the trip. For the equipment I was using I found the conditions favorable for landscape as well as some nice shots of passing pleasure craft as quite fast shutter speeds were available. We went through several drawbridges of which some had to open up for us affording an interesting view from our boat. Unfortunately my friend was consistently having problems due to our boats slow speed getting focused and getting the shot. Some low flying eagles presented themselves and he couldn't even get them in the viewfinder. I tried his camera, but I didn't have much better luck. The poor view, focus issues, and shutter lag were a terrible handicap. The end of this story was viewing the results afterwards, he's planning on returning the camera for a refund if he can and thankful he didn't sell me his Super Program yet. Of course this was no DSLR, but this is the kind of equipment that many people are replacing their 35mm P&S camera with. I don't think there was anything wrong with his camera and it was just delivering what it had to offer. I find this totally astounding that the public is satisfied with this kind of product. A simple inexpensive $50 35mm P&S would have jumped through hoops around this thing! Someone on the list said that people are not that interested in quality must be right if they can continue to actually sell this camera. Heck, Walmart could cut their photo image quality in half, save money, and people would still be happy! If it looks sort of like an SLR, has an attractive appearance, and says "digital" somewhere, it doesn't matter if it can actually take pictures right? I realize that there may be some decent P&S digitals out there, but this was our experience today. End of rant! Dave
