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Review of the Fuji FinePix Real 3D W1 cameraBy Donald E. SimanekStereo photographers may have an excuse for going digital, now that Fuji offers this 3d camera with many of the features they want, all packed into a sleek and compact camera. It does exactly what good stereo requires: It takes two pictures simultaneously, one for the left and one for the right eye, which can easily be computer-processed for viewing in any format now in use. Add to that its 2d capabilities, and you have one camera that does it all.This page requires a monitor width of at least 1000 pixels in order to see both images for cross-eyed stereo viewing. Since the photos also have large vertical dimension, it helps to toggle the "full screen" view (F11 in Windows). However, if you haven't mastered that viewing method, these pictures may also be appreciated as 2d flat photos. All are © 2008 by Donald Simanek. For instructions on free-viewing 3d by the cross eyed method, see the How to View 3D page.
Can internet reviews be trusted?The Fuji FinePix REAL 3D W1 digital camera has just been released. I haven't seen one yet, nor has my order from Japan reached me [Oct 1, 2009]. But before ordering it I read numerous reviews of it on the internet, and I read Fuji's own web documents about it. These reviews say more about the reviewers than they say useful things about the camera. One even went to far as to say it was the worst camera ever made. He must have very limited experience with cameras, and the ignorance displayed in his review shows that he certainly hasn't much experience with stereo photography.Here's what Fuji has to say about it: Fujifilm.com and Fujifilm USA. Some reviewers do admit that they had only an hour of hands-on experience with the camera. That probably isn't enough time to read the instruction manual. Others had "seen one" at a trade show. Yet they feel qualified to pontificate on it, and in the process make mistakes that any knowledgable stereo photographer will recognize as untrue statements. Before I write my review (below) I'd like to cite some of these.
Results of my early tests.My comments below will focus on this camera as a stereo camera, for that's the reason people will want to buy it. The camera's 2d capabilities are a nice to have, perhaps, but stereo photographers will seldom use them.[6 October, 2009] The camera arrived this morning. My first impression is positive. The case is black enameled metal, only the sliding lens cover is plastic. It has a solid feel. The controls are a bit differently configured from other digital cameras, but most of the functions we expect on such cameras are there, plus the extra 3d functions. The back of the camera has toggle controls for many functions, on both sides of the large LCD screen. These often have several functions, designated by icons that are a bit smaller than I'd prefer. They obviously wanted to keep the camera as small as possible. Various shooting modes may be selected, hidden in the menu under "scene positions": the usual ones: auto, manual, aperture priority (f:8, 5 and 3.7 only), night, sunset, sports, close-up, party, and options you may never use, even if you did remember they are available. The camera has the usual shutter choices: flash suppressed, auto, anti-red-eye. The camera also takes movies, in 3d or 2d, at 30 fps, and either 640x480 or 320x240 pixel size. I haven't tested that, nor do I have the experience to compare it to other digital movie cameras. The 3d LCD display on the back isn't as annoying as I expected, and it can be switched to 2D even when shooting 3D. I charged the battery for a couple of hours, put in a memory card, formatted it, and these were the first four pictures I took:
Roses.
Fall crocus. Subject partly in sun, partly in shade.
Cropped version of the previous subject from a different angle, to show detail.
Our house. None of the pictures above above have been enhanced or tinkered with except the cropped one. The camera was on "normal" (the default) quality and with its "Fujichrome emulation" option, which enhances colors. Otherwise the camera setting was "Auto" everything. Photographing stereo action requires perfectly synchronized shutters, and this camera has them. So I took a day with the Fuji camera just to shoot the many waterfalls at Rickets Glen state park in PA. The falls are in a deep gorge, and it was a cloudy day, so some pictures were a bit dark and required gamma correction. I also reduced them linearly to about 1/5 original size, for display on this web page, and sharpened them for clarity of details. This is always recommended for pictures reproduced on websites.
Connie and I. Photo taken by another hiker.
Lessons learned from this expedition:
Adding things.The design of the camera doesn't make it easy to add anything on its front. Most compact digital cameras are similarly unfriendly to the tinkerer.My preliminary tests suggest that the camera works if a linear polarizer is used (large enough to cover both lenses}. You don't need a circular polarizer (many digital cameras require them), but if you had a circular polarizer that large, you could. Polarization helps increase saturation of colors of foliage, and can darken blue skies. It is also handy for blocking specular reflections from shiny surfaces and from water surfaces. Still, it's not very practical with this camera, for it is so easy to get sun reflections in the polarizing sheet when the sun is behind you. The flash lamp located between the lenses gives conflicting and disturbing shadows in close ups and portraits when there's a wall behind the subject. This is more annnoying in 3d than in 2d. It works nicely for medium distance shots, though, and to fill in shadows in otherwise well lighted scenes. But this is a problem with compact 2d cameras as well. There is no provision for plugging in an auxiliary or remote flash, but one could use the camera's fill flash lamp to trigger an external flash, using an inexpensive solid state flash trigger device. I intend to try this. I tried bouncing the camera's built-in flash from a ceiling, a trick I've used successfully with other such 2d cameras, but the picture was severely overexposed. I have not figured out where the sensor is located that monitor's the scene's illumination, but I suspect it is integrated into the left lens. Still, I'm puzzled why deflecting the flash to the ceiling confused the system. It is a pretty standard trick that I've used successfully many times before with other digital cameras.
Picture Quality.I've seen internet reviews that complain about the pictures from this camera having low image quality, digital noise in low light, and occasional lens flare. I have taken over 200 pictures with mine so far, in various lighting conditions, including daylight situations where you might expect lens flare, and haven't seen any evidence of that. But I avoid shooting toward the sun. As to quality, the pictures have far greater pixel count and resolution than I need, and the color fidelity is fine, I see no geometric distortion even at wide angle settings (like barrel distortion which is common in compact digital cameras). I have examined the individual pictures taken in daylight at the highest magnification and see no noticeable spherical aberration, chromatic abberation, or coma. At larger apertures, some of these faults are just detectable at extreme enlargment. I can't understand what these critics expect of this camera. It's a 3d camera, and I don't think anyone is going to blow up the pictures to make 3d murals. The 2d capability is only a minor reason for this camera's existence, and the quality is still more than I need. The best test would be to digitally project the pictures onto a theater-sized 20 foot wide screen for polarized viewing. But even stereo clubs often don't have equipment for this yet and couldn't afford it, certainly not any digital projectors matching the capability of those used in 3d theaters. The digital projectors in school classrooms don't have anywhere near the resolution and quality of the pictures from the Fuji 3d camera.Perhaps some camera club should do a double-blind test with a real audience viewing 2d pictures on a large screen from various high end 10 megapixel cameras and also 2d pictures made with the Fuji 3d camera, and see whether they can really tell which pictures were taken with the Fuji. I suspect the outcome would show that they can't. I'd love to see the results. The camera stores pictures in a JPG format, and can be set at either of two levels of compression, FINE, or NORMAL (the default). These are set with a menu accessible from the very small f button at the lower right corner on the camera back. Some new users don't discover this right away, and its mention in the camera manual is brief. I even sense a subtle photography snobbery at work here. Canon and Nikon owners act as if anything from Fuji or Pentax is unworthy of consideration. I'm reminded of the wine 'experts' who, in a double-blind taste test, couldn't tell their expensive favorite wines from some of the less expensive "no-name" brands.
The quality issue, take 2Talking about quality is a murky exercise. Illustrating it on a web page is also difficult, since web page pictures must be reduced in size. But here's an attempt to give readers a sense of it. I took a picture of our department secretary, Barbara Greene (usually a good sport about such things), and show the full picture at the left (reduced in size, of course). The original was 3602 x 2733 pixels. It was taken hand held at the wide angle setting, with available fluorescent light (no flash), so the camera kicked into its highest sensitivity mode (ISO 1600). This would be expected to cause the most digital noise and lowest resolution. I.e., it is a worst-case example. At the right is just a portion of the same picture without size reduction. Arty, isn't it? The look is her usual "What are you up to this time?".
If one really wanted a close-cropped portrait, the camera lens could have been set at its "tele" (narrow angle) setting, for much better result. Or bounce flash could have been used. This picture was deliberately made to push the limits of this camera's performance. Here's how to do it, hand held, no flash:
Picky, picky. What's 1/3 degree?But, back to the real world. I have noticed that SPM reports a rotation disparity between the L and R pictures, from 0 to 0.7 degrees, averaging about 0.3 degrees. But SPM's "auto-alignment" function fixes this neatly and perfectly, so it doesn't concern me at all. Whether it would even be noticeable with Fuji's $500 autostereoscopic frame viewer I can't say. Probably not. It doesn't matter to me, for I dislike autosereoscopic systems, and certainly wouldn't pay that much for one.Slight image rotation and vertical disparity of this amount is common in stereo cameras and stereo adapters. When Loreo macro LIAC pictures are processed by SPM, it reports correction of rotation of about half a degree, and correction of an easily noticeable vertical disparity. The vertical disparity of the Fuji 3d is a much smaller amount than the Loreo; just a few pixels. I suspect that even the hallowed Stereo Realist had these "defects" as well, due to "play" in film tracking. Meticulous stereo photographers corrected this when aligning the pictures in aluminum masks and mounts, especially if the stereo pictures were destined for projection on a screen.
Things to love about this camera.Those of us who have previously taken stereo photos with film stereo camereas have often felt limited by the rather narrow horizontal angle of view of those cameras and of the available hand viewers. Beam splitter adapters were much worse, cutting this width in half. The stereo realist gave us only 36°, which is why some of us bought Busch Verascope cameras (in spite of their faults) which gave us 40°. The Fuji 3d, in its default (wide) setting gives (by my rough claculations) more than 50°. Add to that the exceptional depth of field of short focal length lenses, from a few feet to infinity, and taking pictures like the one below is a snap.
(Picture of Pine Creek taken Oct 10, 2009 at Black Walnut Bottom access area, Pennsylvania.) Detail is fine from the rocky creek bottom a few feet away, to the shoreline rocks and to the distant wooded hills. My analytic mind made me suppose that sucn wider angle pictures would look bad with narrow angle viewing methods, and nearly all viewing methods are narrow angle except IMAX theater screens. But I was wrong, and I find the wider angle pictures to be quite effective and pleasing to view. Another advantage of the wide view is that it also covers greater height. Tall buildings and trees can be photographed, then cropped from the sides to a taller than wide format. With 2d cameras, we'd turn the camera 90° for such pictures, but you don't dare to that with stereo.
A lot of unphotogenic content was cropped from both sides of this. Yes, I was standing on the centerline of the road. Traffic is light in this remote part of Pennsylvania. The ability to zoom from wide to tele setting quickly is a luxury we never had with film stereo cameras. It's often a good idea to take a narrower view picture just after taking a wide one, to remove unwanted elements from the picture when it's not possible to move closer. I was concerned that the 77mm stereo baseline, significantly wider than the spacing of human eyes, might give exaggerated depth. But eye-brain stereo physiology is a strange thing. With standard viewing methods, the pictues from this camera look fine to me, and if they do have depth exaggeration, it looks good in most scenes. The larger baseline is not good for portraits and closeups, however. One should avoid having distant objects in such scenes, for they will be distracting. The automatic mode of this camera is addicting in its convenience and good "judgment". I predict most pictures taken with this camera will be taken with full automatic. I have yet to take a picture with this camera that was not well-exposed and sharply focused. A few did require a slight gamma tweaking with software, due to my own haste in taking the picture when the center focus area was on a very bright object. Some of us like panoramic pictures, and have been taking such scenes in 2d panels with slight overlap, then stitching them together with smart software like the PanaVue Image Assembler (my favorite). The 2d mode of the Fuji camera has a feature to facilitate this. You can take one panel of a panoramic, with the camera saving a copy of it and displaying a phantom copy of it in the viewfinder to aid in aligning and overlapping the next panel, and so on. This same feature can be used, in the camera's 2d mode, for taking a cha-cha pair that will be later become a larger or smaller baseline stereo picture, using StereoPhotoMaker or similar software. This, along with the camera's macro capability, can be useful for macrophotograpy. These are methods we've long been using with 2d cameras, and are described elsewhere. See shifty methods for taking stereo pictures. [October 24, 2009] But this camera allows macrophotography in a much better way, if you are willing to construct an inexpensive and simple (but tricky to assemble) accessory device. See Macrophotography With the Fuji 3D Camera. Prelimary conclusions.Stereo photographers are not used to camera automation, but they can adapt to it if the results are worth the trouble. In this case, I tentatively conclude that the positive features of this camera outweigh its nuisance features, and many stereo photographers will be won over. Just being able to use synchronized zoom lenses from wide to mild telephoto is a wonderful convenience. At the default wide setting, the camera covers a horizontal angle of view almost twice that of the classic Stereo Realist camera. I find myself using that setting most of the time, reserving the option to crop the pictures later. That's an easy operation with StereoPhotoMaker.The default 4:3 (a bit wider than high) picture format is my favorite, but other choices are available. The square format that stereo photographers have been using for years need not constrain us any more. The Fuji 3d has most of the features one expects in compact digital cameras that we never had in film stereo cameras (except for very expensive custom-made stereo cameras). Automatic color balance. Autofocus. Auto-exposure. Automatic sensitivity setting. Aperture priority option. For those who shun such amenities, there's an option for completely manual operation. In automatic mode the ISO (sensitivity) setting is chosen by the camera, determined by lighting conditions; the user must choose one of the other modes to lock its value. So far I've mainly used the Auto setting, and the camera seems to be smart enough to make the right choices. This is another thing stereo photographers will find takes a bit of getting used to. I have only explored the features of the Fuji 3d camera that are important to me. I leave it to others to report on the many other features of this camera. I hope I have dispelled some of the misconceptions and misrepresentations that have appeared earlier on the web. The camera is not perfect. What is? But it delivers great stereo pictures with addictive ease and convenience. Compare it with what you are now using and you may find you can't live without it.
If we held back, waiting for perfection, we wouldn't be using computers, or driving cars, or talking on telephonesand we'd all be single. Donald SimanekAll stereo pictures on this page © 2009 by Donald E. Simanek.
Stereo pictures for cross-eyed viewing 3d Gallery One.
Shifty methods for taking stereo pictures.
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