Our management. Mark Thurston. Aileen Thompson. Strategic Director Community Engagement and Communications. Chris Rayner. Mike Lyons. Emma Head. Michael Bradley CB. Neil Hayward. Nicole Geoghegan. Tim Smart. Ruth Todd. Expocrete Edmonton, AB. Jewell Waco, TX. Miller Kansas City, MO. Northfield Mundelein, IL. Sierra Fontana, CA. Superlite Phoenix, AZ. Even then, your thumb tends to knock up against the flash housing whenever you zoom in. Slightly further back on an angled panel are the mode dial and a second unmarked Command dial for changing exposure, sensitivity and other menu selections.
A panel on the right opens to reveal the SD card slot, separate from the AA battery compartment in the base. The back of the camera has a row of 5 dedicated buttons for ISO sensitivity, metering mode, AF mode, focus mode and white balance. One touch I particularly liked was the designation of the top button on the four-way controller to toggle RAW shooting modes.
The 3 inch LCD screen is clear, bright and contrasty enough to see well in all but bright outdoor light. Like the Sony Cyber-shot HXV screen, it flips out and up so you can shoot from the waist, it can also be turned downwards, for some reason only by 45 degrees, though you can still get a clear view when shooting overhead.
The f2. The 24mm super-wide angle view is as wide as it gets on just about any fixed-lens camera, the same as on the PowerShot SX30 and significantly wider than the 27mm of the Cyber-shot HXV, making it great for landscape, indoors and group shots.
There are two modes, Continuous and Shooting only. Set to the default EXR Auto, the HS20 differentiates 27 scene types broadly categorized into those with and without people, landscapes, backlit, night shots, and those containing sky, greenery and sunsets. Alternatively you can manually select the EXR mode yourself.
Pairs of diagonally-aligned pixels on the sensor can then be reconfigured to enhance the resolution or dynamic range, or reduce noise. Finally, people and indeed anything that moves in the frame are recorded as several ghost outlines, which means that you can really only record static, empty scenes, something that Sony have solved in the latest iteration of their Sweep Panorama feature.
To the right of the shooting mode dial is a smaller command dial with a positive clicking action which is used for scrolling through features and captured images, and will feel immediately intuitive to anyone who has handled a DSLR before.
The same dial is also used to change the aperture and shutter speed when using the more advanced shooting modes. In the Manual mode, you hold the Exposure Compensation button down with your forefinger and give the dial a flick with your thumb to change the aperture, not as intuitive as having two separate command dials but perhaps understandable given the HS20's target audience.
Otherwise the exposure compensation button works largely as you'd expect, with a visual slider graph on screen accompanied by a live histogram. Pressing this button brings up four options - Off, Top 4, Best Frame Capture and three different kinds of bracketing exposure, film simulation mode and dynamic range.
Choosing Top 4 allows you to take 8 full-resolution photos at 8 frames per second, which is faster than most compact cameras and indeed most DSLRs too. The only fly in the ointment are that only 4 out of the 8 are actually saved to the memory card.
Choosing Best Frame Capture shoots at 11fps at 8 megapixel resolution from the moment that you focus and then saves up to 16 images including pre-recorded frames.
Once the burst is completed, it takes over fifteen seconds for the camera to clear the buffer, during which you cannot take another picture.
There is also another continuous shooting speeds where the Fujifilm HS20 EXR shoots at a faster speed 11fps at at 4 megapixel resolution for up to 32 frames. Flick this to On, and the rear LCD or electronic viewfinder — depending on which one you previously had selected — blinks into life, a process taking around two seconds, which for once is not quite as good as most DSLRs.
Still, the Fujifilm FinePix SFS is very fast to determine focus and exposure with a half press of the shutter button, taking less than 0. Although JPEGs are quickly committed to memory in single-shot mode with only the briefest pause between each one, unfortunately there's a very noticeable 5 second delay between the capture of one RAW file and the next during which you can't take another picture, which rather slows down the shooting experience unless you stick to the JPEG format.
While some may debate whether an adjustable LCD is an essential feature or a sales gimmick, once you get used to using one it's something you find yourself missing when it's not there, proving particularly useful when holding the camera above your head or as a waist-level finder for more candid shots. The EVF also has its own dioptric correction wheel to its immediate left, which is far less stiff and physically larger than found on competing models, meaning that for the myopic adjustment can be made in a faction of a second.
The viewfinder display is itself large, bright and clear, though the temptation to predominantly utilise the more flexible LCD below is almost overwhelming. A welcome addition comes in the form of a sensor which automatically switches between the EVF and viewfinder when you hold the camera up to eye-level, speeding up the transfer from using the LCD to taking a shot through the EVF.
Note that his feature can be turned off if you find it annoying. Starting from the top, there are buttons for choosing the ISO speed, metering multi pattern, spot or average , AF mode center, multi, area or tracking , AF type continuous, single shot or manual , and the White Balance.
All five buttons also perform actions during image playback, denoted by the blue symbols, resulting in a logical system that provides quick and easy access to most of the camera's key functions. Ranged at north, south, east and west around this control are variously, a means of toggling RAW mode on and off doubling up as a file deletion button when in playback mode , the various flash modes, the self timer options, and shifting focus from infinity to either macro or super macro.
Press the Menu button in shooting mode and you get a comprehensive choice of options from two main folders. Most of the options are the "set once and forget" kind, so you won't have to dip into the menu system too often.
Completing the rear of the HS20 EXR is a self-explanatory playback button for quickly viewing captured images. The base of the Fujifilm FinePix HS20 EXR features a screw thread for a tripod, sadly made of plastic and not in line with the lens barrel, and a sliding door hiding the compartment for the four AA batteries stored within the handgrip. Battery life varies from poor with the supplied alkaline batteries to very good with a decent set of Ni-Mh rechargeables, obtaining over shots on one charge down from on the HS There are metal loops either side of the body for attaching the provided strap.
All of the sample images in this Review were taken using the 16 megapixel JPEG setting, which gives an average image size of around 5. It handled noise fairly well, with a little noise appearing at the relatively slow speed of ISO and then becoming progressively worse at the faster settings of ISO and , along with a smearing of fine detail.
The fastest full-resolution settings of ISO and suffer from an even greater loss of detail and colour saturation. The headling-grabbing settings of ISO and are both actually shot at a reduced resolution medium and small respectively and they're noisy too. Chromatic aberrations were well controlled, with limited purple fringing effects appearing only in high contrast situations. The 16 megapixel images were just a little soft straight out of the camera at the default sharpen setting and require some further sharpening in an application like Adobe Photoshop, or you can change the in-camera sharpening level.
Macro performance is excellent, allowing you to focus as close as 1cm away from the subject when the lens is set to wide-angle.
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