Fuji XS-1 Superzoom Camera

fuji xs-1 camera gear
xs-1 camera with skylight filter and lens cap, lens hood, camera bag, sd memory card, extra battery and battery charger

A good many pictures on this site were taken with the Fuji XS-1 Superzoom Camera – its essentially a bridge camera that apes the functionality of a dslr (digital single lens relfex) with a big zoom – 26x to be exact. I got it in July 2012 and it has helped me take some great pics.

The XS-1 can be safely placed in the upper spec of the superzoom category of cameras –  its got a pretty big sensor for an all-in-one, good quality zoom lens and is packed with many features found on dslr cameras such as burst shooting functionality and iso levels up to 6400. The XS-1 also feels good with a solid design and suitable heft, its a really nice camera to use. However as I will explain in more detail below, the camera is not good in low light and does not give good high iso pictures so i decided to take the leap up to full dslr and upgrade to a canon 7d after seeing a good deal on the interwebs.

So what you get with this camera on paper is great shot making flexibility and myriad shooting opportunities – in practice however one needs pretty good light levels to really get the best from it. Why is this? 2 things – zoom levels and sensor size. When shooting far away things handheld at, or near, the xs-1’s full zoom you need as much light as possible because the aperture is narrower (at least 5.6) and shutter speed will need to be higher to get a sharp shot – on the 600mm 26x end of the zoom you would need about 1/600 speed. A higher shutter speed and narrower aperture means less light coming into the sensor and therefore either good light or a higher iso level is needed to capture an image at a decent exposure. Without good light therefore you need higher iso and the higher it is the more noise is in the image and the more detail is lost. The Xs-1 can take pics up to iso 6400 but really anything above 1600 was close to unusable for me with the extra noise created on the image. The Xs-1 has a few special modes to help take clear pictures in low light, using a technique of taking three shots of the same image and combining them to make a single better image but the results are merely ok. In the end what the camera needs is a bigger sensor to help it function better in lower light – the Xs-1 sensor is less than a quarter the size of those found in a standard dslr so this gives some idea that low light performance in dslr’s is significantly better. So just put a bigger sensor in the camera right? Well i don’t think it is that straight-forward because the smaller sensor size allows greater zoom magnification in the lens. A significantly bigger sensor in a superzoom would therefore require a much more substantial and *expensive* lens. So a larger sensor and substantial zoom lens would result in a much more expensive product that would thusly miss the price/performance sweet-spot these types of camera aim for.

I think the camera is a really nice point and shoot type where you can easily take lots of quality pics but you do need good light. The Xs-1 does not perform well in low light. And if you want to take high quality pics at the zoom zoom end of the lens you need perfect conditions to get ok results.

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