Product Reviews:

         
Excellent compact digital camera with full manual controls, December 3, 2005
Reviewer: Walter Jeffries "Walter"

This fall my Nikon 990 digital camera died its final death and I have been hunting for a replacement since. Last Friday I got a FujiFilm FinePix E900 digital camera. I've shot about 1,000 pictures with it and written up a review with some sample photos. In a nutshell I like the camera. It is not perfect, what is, but it is an excellent small pocket camera with full manual and automatic settings and I'm glad I got it. Very fast shutter response - great for capturing children and animals.

You can see my full review with sample photos on my blog at:

http://sugarmtnfarm.com/blog/2005/12/fuji-finepix-e900-review-part-ii.html

Pros: Size, price, photo quality, zoom, speed, color, flash
Cons: Focus is not as snappy as it was on my Nikon 990

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disappoints - i wanted to love this camera!, April 3, 2006
Reviewer: Paul Christensen "grtdanepa"

After my trusty Olympus D40 Zoom died at the end of a recent vacation, I spent about 30 hours researching a replacement that would offer (a) outstanding image quality, (b) speed, (c) compact size, (d) use standard AA batteries, (e) full manual controls, (f) optical viewfinder. From many (but not all) reviews, it looked like the E900 would satisfy my requirements.

Unfortunately, the E900 that I purchased fell seriously short in two "show stopper" areas - image quality and speed. I have reason to suspect (but was never able to verify) that the unit I purchased was defective, as every image I took had enormous amounts of noise and lack of detail in low-contrast areas of the picture. I tried full-auto, as well as manually adjusting ISO and compression settings to no avail. What leads me to believe my unit was defective is:

(1) I can't imagine any manufacturer releasing a camera that takes pictures as bad as my E900 did

(2) when I took a picture of a subject illuminated by sunlight, the camera's EXIF comments indicated that the flash was required but not used. And yes, this daylight picture had fuzzy details and lots of noise.

Interestingly, of the 6 or so professional reviews of this camera in other sites, one reviewer did indicate problems with "muddied details" that could not be corrected by adjusting ISO or image compression. In that reviewer's example picture, blades of grass appeared "watercolored". The unit I purchased was far worse than this, but had similar problems with detail.

The second deal breaker that ultimately had me return this and look for a different model was the speed of the user interface. Granted, this is a 9MP camera, but the speed of image playback, as well as zooming in and out on a picture is just GLACIALLY slow. My 4-year-old 4MP Olympus ran circles around the playback performance, not to mention offering a better user interface.

It is for this reason that I offer my 3-star rating, giving image quality the benefit of the doubt. (If I had rated this camera on image quality I saw, it would have received 1 star!)

It's a shame, because there are lots of things to like about this camera:
- 9MP offers plenty of opportunity to crop and maintain outstanding resolution
- "Natural Light" mode offers ability to take pictures without the harshness of flash
- camera body is extremely well made from mostly metal parts and rubberized grip
- extremely fast startup time and shot-to-shot time
- uses 2 AA batteries
- includes 2500 mAh batteries AND a worldwide travel charger with the camera bundle
- offers full manual controls
- RAW image support (you better have VERY large xD cards for this)
What I didn't care for:
- very poor image quality, muddied details (may have been a problem with my unit)
- no ability to adjust JPEG compression beyond two settings (and the "better" setting was in my opinion too compressed)
- glacially slow playback response and zoom in/out of playback image
- user interface is quirky, and doesn't seem nearly as well thought out and streamlined as competitors (try an Olympus or a Canon and compare)
- uses xD cards, which are only used by Fuji and Olympus so they're more expensive
- very slow when writing very large files (which would be required for RAW mode); some say this is a problem with xD cards in general
In the end, I took a step back and ended up buying a Canon A540. Unfortunately "only" 6MP, but at least with my Fuji E900, the difference in picture quality was phenomenal (and I have sample images taken at the same time to prove it). And, the Canon has a much more polished user interface, uses standard and high-speed SD media, and is a noticeably smaller camera while still using AA batteries. It's a shame, because I had high hopes for a 9MP compact camera.
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