New Fuji S3 announced

Dpreview has the announcement of the "new" S3 Pro. New sensor, new look, no 2 battery types and a Kodak DCS 14N look to the body. Built in vertical release. No price.

http://www.dpreview.com/news/0402/04020 ... ms3pro.asp

Mel

Does anyone know if it can be remotely fired with a radio control?

TIA,

John

I believe this to be a breakthrough camera due to its new sensor. Fuji announced development of this sensor about a year ago and I wrote about it here and in other places. Basically each pixel location has two sensors, one small one and one large one. This allows the larger one to be tuned for shadow detail and the small one for highlight detail resulting in an incredible increase in dynamic range that much more closely mimics human sight allowing recording of scenes with much darker dark areas and much brighter bright areas simultaneously without losing shadow detail or highlight detail. Obviously post processing will still require levels and curves adjustment to make an image contrasty but the exposure latitude problems should be a thing of the past for the S3. Very exciting!

To me, the downside seems to be still using the N80 body in main. The AF is an area badly needed to be upgraded ...

I think it would fair to say it is hard to determine much about S3 Pro for the specifications, at least, is sketchy. You know, as D70 could be so surprising in terms of AF in low-light (EV-1!!!) , 1/500 sec flash sync but has no verticle-grip :roll: : what S3 Pro could do remains much of a mystery. According to my friend and reviews, S2 Pro is amazing in terms of dynamic range and low noise. Educated guess is that S3 Pro would reamin or out-perform.

I don't understand why Fuji did not go full-frame (like 1Ds, 14N) or go "cheap" (300D, D70) but remained on 1.5x crop factor. If she ever went down to 1.3x or lower, I guess it would drag many landscape photographers away from Nikon.

We shall see.


Griffin.