I just got a new camera around Christmas. I wasn’t planning on it, but my old Cannon power shot(A60 I think) died at my son’s school Christmas program. So anyway, the one we got is a Fujifilm finepix S1000fd, 10 mega pixels and 12x zoom.
I have taken 25 pictures so far, and none of them seem up to par with my five year old Cannon. Could it be the camera? Or maybe I just haven’t figured it out yet.
I am wondering if anyone has this camera, or a similar model and if so, what do you think of it?
I have a week or two to change my mind, and get my money back. I think it cost around $225.00 on sale. I would have waited and got something better, but we needed a camera for the holidays, and didn’t have a ton of extra funds.
I am really thinking of taking it back and scrapping together a little more money to go with something better. If I do that…what do you recommend in the $300-400 dollar price range?
The single best way to take better pictures is learn the relationship between ISO, Shutter speed and aperture. Learn those and take pictures in the manual mode for a while. Knowing why your pictures didn’t “come out” will be a much more valuable tool than any fancy camera. It’s the difference between spraying bullets from the hip and taking a well aimed shot. You can email me for tips.
I was baffled when my new camera would take some awesome pictures, followed by really bad and grainy.
It turned out that when I had the flash off, or lighting conditions were poor, it would compensate and produce a grainy, but otherwise normal looking picture. My old camera would take a horrible dark picture which was it’s way of saying “Hey dufus, not enough light!”
This is the only photoI have on line so far. I didn’t like the others enough to download them.
This one was taken in auto mode. My niece snapped a picture of my family today at a party. The lighting was fairly bright in the room, but we flipped the flash up anyway, and it never went off. So maybe that is why this is so yellow?
I plan on messing around with it a lot in the next few days, and seeing what I can come up with. I just haven’t had the time to test it out much yet.
It also seems to put black or white dots on a lot of the photos.
I am a total armature photographer, but I take a lot of pictures, and have had a lot of luck getting some decent shots with that Cannon. It was my first digital camera, so silly me thought they must all be alike, or that this new one which is 5 years newer, and has a lot more features, would be even better!
The light in the room only looked bright to your eyes. Based on the info in the EXIF, it was actually a pretty dark room. Your ISO was 1600, and your f-stop was wide open (2.8). No flash, either.
I also wonder what your white balance is set to. But that’s not in your EXIF that I can find.
I am also happy to send you tips, if you email me. The first thing I would say, though is that you should check the manual and make sure everything is in full auto mode. Including flash and white balance.
The second would be to check your save settings. I don’t know if you reduced that picture for the web, but it is most certainly not 10MP.
Good luck, and don’t throw in the digital towel just yet.
And to relate that to what chacoguy420 was saying. The grainyness comes from the camera raising the ISO. If you don’t want the grainyness either find a way to light the scene OR manually stop down the aperture OR manually increase the shutter speed a stop or two and hold the camera really steady.
OK - this is going to sound a little harsh, but it’s not meant as a personal attack: Understand your camera.
I suspect that if you put the camera in full-auto mode, it will take photos that are better than your old Canon. As soon as you start to change modes, you had better understand how the following things affect your images: Exposure, ISO, Shutter speed, Aperture, flash.
Find someone who knows about digital photography, and spend some time picking their brain.
The previous model Fuji got a “Highly Recommended” rating on dpreview, so unless this one is actually broken, you should be able to take great photos with it.
No, not harsh at all. That is why I wondered if it was me or the camera that sucked.
I got really spoiled with the old digital camera. I almost always used the auto mode, and didn’t mess around with the settings at all. And with this new one, unless my husband changed something, it came this way, and I will just have to learn more about the different settings. I don’t think it came with a printed manual either, so I need to dig out the CD manual and study up.
I actually used to know a little about photography once upon a time, and for 2 years developed film and pictures for my high school. I wasn’t great at anything, but did fairly well with the little amount of knowledge and equipment I had.
I am probably one of those people who knows just enough to mess things up. But that was 25+ years ago, and for about 20 years after High school, I got by with a little Cannon Snappy camera. It was a 35mm point and shoot. All it has is a flash. So I very lazy and forgot a lot of what I used to know.
Your settings are messed up for sure…
No manual? Weird, really should have had one if a new camera.
Like they said, read the book.
I have 2 Sony, 2 Fuji, 1 Canon and all give good pictures.
I do not use the camera down load software. I always download with a reader and copy (COPY) to the computer. I do all deleting and stuff with the card in the camera. The computer can not mess with the camera or card this way. For simple but plenty powerful photo work I use Ifranview (free) to work with pictures on the computer. Card reader is faster also.
Also, this way camera built in software won’t mess with pictures before you get them to the computer.
Christmastime 2007, I decided to buy my first digital camera. I got sucked onto the megapixel hype and bought a Fuji Finepix (don’t remember the model#) with 12mp and crazy zoom, and it was pocket-sized. I thought it was great.
Turned out it was actually defective, there was a line of dead pixels that went vertically right up the middle. I took it back to Best Buy and it turned out that it was a discontinued model and they didn’t have any more to exchange.
The person who helped me the second time was a manager who actually had a lot of knowledge and seemed to know what he was talking about, wasn’t one of the kids I usually encounter trying to sell me stuff. I was still eying another Fuji or other super-megapixel when he steered be to a Cannon PowerShot, 8mp 10x zoom, and not quite pocket-sized. (priced at $280 then)
This Cannon takes far better pictures than the Fuji did, dead pixels aside. Maybe there was something else wrong with the Fuji besides the dead pixels, but when I repeated the same shots at home after I got the Cannon unpacked, there wasn’t a question the 2nd camera was better.
The Cannon lives in my bag, it goes absolutely everywhere with me! I have photography experience, but prefer to be lazy and let the Cannon do everything in Auto mode. It takes beautiful pictures that people comment on all the time. I’m really glad I ended up with it instead of the Fuji.
I’d link to the comparison shots, but refuse to use photosharing sites. They make me nervous for some reason. Sorry.
I agree with everyone that says ‘learn your camera’. I got a a Sony DSC-H9 as a gift and it’s a much better one but my early pictures didn’t come out as well as the ones taken with my old camera that was just a point and shoot with no complicated settings. My pictures are getting better and better now that I’m learning more about how to use it. It can be a little tedious to take the same picture with different settings so that you can compare them but it’s worth it in the long run.
There’s such a boatload of yellow from the incandescent lighting but some of the fleshtones look better here IMO. And yeah, the grain is uber annoying. I sharpened it, which seems to help a little.
Is there a lighting mode on your camera? I have used only Canon cameras and you can select a mode for different lighting conditions (cloudy, tungsten, dark etc). Your picture looks a bit yellow, which is probably because of the incandescent lighting. I find that setting the right mode gives me much better pictures.
Also I like to keep the ISO a bit low and use a tripod with a slower shutter speed indoors. Makes the pictures much less grainy.
Although the manufacturers claim high ISO speeds, the pictures become really grainy the higher you go.
We picked up an Olympus - 550 something or other… pictures were coming out blurry, with ghosts and all sorts of things - background bits (trees, furniture, etc) would mostly be fine.
After much deliberation about things, I went in and checked the ‘full’ auto mode - they had the ISO set to 50… yes - 50!
Since we couldnt find a way to override it, I made a new mode that had the ISO set to 400, 99% of our problems went away with that camera - we just have to remember not to use 'Auto".
Moral of the story - not every “Auto” mode is good… our Canon’s (Powershot) Auto mode was superb.
What happened there is, as you’ve noted, the camera didn’t flash (look in your manual to figure out how to force flash, or make sure you don’t have it set to flash-off mode) and the camera defaulted to a high ISO. The yellow cast is caused because the camera’s white balance was set to daylight, and incandescent lighting causes a yellow cast. I would not try color correcting this image. There is way too much lost color information (due to the white balance) for you to recover natural-looking colors. I would just convert it to be black and white and be done with it.
It is surprising to me that in auto mode the camera did not default to flash. In a situation like this, almost all point-and-shoots would. I think somehow you have turned the flash mode off. Does the flash go off in a completely dark room? The other possibility is that there is a flash-on, flash-auto, and flash-off mode, and it’s set to flash-auto, and the camera decided that it’s within the range of possibility to take an ambient light photo, so it did. Still, usually cameras in auto mode will default to a higher f/stop (like f/5.6 or f/8) and a mid-level ISO (like 200-400) and flash when taking pictures in dark rooms. For me, it usually takes a bit of twiddling to shut all those fail-safes off.
