My FujiFilm Finepix HS 10

This happen to be a delayed posting since I have gotten the brand new camera months ago but well, this allow me to fully test out the functionality of the new HS10 which is highly praised for its cool performance.

I bought this camera sometimes back not long after it was launched in Malaysia. The price I found at Fotokem was RM2088 which I felt was exorbitant considering it was only a superzoom camera and its not even a DSLR. I mean, you can buy an entry level DSLR in less than RM2000 so who really be interested in getting a non-DSLR camera in such price. It just turn me off straight away by looking at the price. More over, FujiFilm is not a camera brand which I have ever think of buying anyway.

But the temptation was just too great to resist and eventually, I browsed Ebay for the camera and I got it at less than RM1500 including a 16Gb memory card. It just took 3 days for the camera to ship from Hong Kong to my door step. Everything was in the box and before I knew it, the camera is Made In Indonesia! Well, I'm okay with it still.

The first impression on the camera was great. The camera was built quite rigid and the grip was comfortable enough. Honest saying, the grip is somewhat better than some of the entry level DSLR camera which cost much more expensive.

One of the main attraction which drive me to get this camera was the 30X Mechanical Zoom Ring. Yeah, it just work exactly like a DSLR zoom lens where you just rotate the zoom ring on the lens and the image will just zoom in instantly. No more pressing on the + or - button to zoom in and out. Using manual zoom ring gives you a faster response and more accurate zoom level compared to the motorized zoom. On top of that, it also has a manual focus ring on the lens which allow me to perform manual focus. This is really cool as not even all the expensive DSLR lens has a manual focus ring. This comes handy when I want to take some artistic blurry background image.

The fixed lens can be zoom up to 30X which is equivalent to a 720mm lens. It was so powerful that I can zoom in to shoot the jumbo jet in the sky or even the moon. Yes, I said the moon. When you have the power to zoom so much like this, you need a very good image stabilizer to prevent blurry image when you zoom it to the max. The HS 10 comes with dual image stabilizer comprised of a sensor shift stabilizer and the digital image stabilizer. Switch on both of this and you are less worry about blurry image even when you zoom it to the 30X limit without a tripod.
Let me demonstrate how cool is the 30X zoom and how well the image stabilization mechanism works. Below photo is taken without tripod and photo resolution is set at 5 Megapixel with normal sharpness.

Photo Quality
The camera comes with a 10 Megapixel sensor which is more than enough for my requirement. I'm not a freak who looks for a high Megapixel gadget. I can't see what is the difference between a photo printed on a 5 megapixel resolution compared to a 10 megapixel one. Its just the same.
Apart of the normal jpeg photo format, this camera also capable to store photo in RAW format. Okay, I'm not good at this so I'm gonna stick with the usual jpeg format.

The camera has a 3 inch LCD which can be tilted to the top and bottom. This could be useful when you want to hold the camera overhead or lower it close to the ground. Though this may not be a function one would frequently use but its an advantage over most of other camera out there which has a fixed LCD screen.

The camera comes with a whole lots of preset function so you don't have to figure out how to achieve certain affect on the setup. Some of the cool function including; Panorama Swipe function where you could swipe the camera horizontally or vertically and the camera will merge each image frame altogether. Multi Motion Capture
Motion Remover

High Definition Video
The HS10 is built with the ability to record HD movies apart of the normal video. It can record both 720p HD as well as 1080p Full HD format at 30fps. Though, it sure eat up your memory like no other. It record about 9 minutes of Full HD movie per Gb and my 16Gb card could record approximately 157 minutes. The camera also built with a mini HDMI port so that you could plug in the camera to a HD TV to enjoy the movie in High Definition.
This camera also comes with a super slow motion movie shot at 1000fps. Well I haven't really give it a try just yet.

With so many cool functions on this camera, its not to say it is perfect or flawless. I do find a few issue about this camera which I'm not really comfortable with.
First off, the time taken to store an image is really slow. The camera will black out for more than 1 seconds after each single shot before you can take another shot. Reducing the image size does not pose any significant difference so I guess it is not about the file transfer speed into the memory card. Instead I guess it was the image processing work which takes up the time. This is an annoying problem to many other HS10 owner and I guess there is no fix on this issue.

Secondly would be the zoom ring. Although the zoom works perfectly fine when taking photo, it has some problem when using the camera to shoot video. The zoom is not very smooth to allow me to rotate it slowly to an object in a smooth manner. Okay, I know I can't complain much on a camera at this price.

Overall, the HS 10 is a really good camera which built with almost everything one needed. There are many cool preset mode for me to took photo the way I wanted. Though there are some flaw about the camera but I guess I could live with that. But then the lag in image saving time is annoying and I hope there could be some sort of firmware update to improve this.

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