I'm considering buying a Fuji 4700 Finepix as this is the smallest camera available to-day with 3x optical zoom and video. After reading all reviews and user comments my level of confusion is now complete!

There is quite a lot of discussion going on over "sharp" and "soft" pictures and I have to agree that the pictures (e.g. the "House" pictures shown on this site) of a Sony DSC S70 look much sharper than a picture of the Fuji 4700FX.

However, I also noticed (as suggested by Dimitry Kovalenko in the DSC S70 comments) that these results are also related to the amount of digital filtering (contrast / brghtness levels) that is applied to the picture before it is stored in the camera.

I have used software settings in the MGI PhotoSuite and MS PhotoDraw to sharpen the "House" (F47HALF.jpg) picture of the Fuji 4700. The results were astonishing. I managed to get the SCREENimage of the 4700 looking as sharp as the DSC S70. Apparently Sony applies a high degree of digital filtering and Fuji applies little or none.

Now my questions:

If this is true (I believe so based on my own findings), why is this phenomena not mentioned in any of the reviews.

It seems a better approach to not apply any filtering in the camera (the source remains "clean") but use software edit programs later.

How can we determine whether sharpness of the reviewed camera is a result of digital manipulation of excellent optics ??

-- Bas Pennings (destaete@planet.nl), June 20, 2000

Answers

I'm going to confuse you even further now. The final quality will depend on when the sharpening filter was applied. IMHO doing anything to an image after it's been JPEG compressed is similar to closing the equine domicile portals after the escape of the animal. Even the best quality JPEG compression introduces artefacts that are only exaggerated by sharpening filters. If Sony have applied the sharpening in camera, before the image was compressed, or as part of the compression algorithm, then all other things being equal, that image will be superior to one that has been JPEGed first, and sharpened later.

-- Pete Andrews (p.l.andrews@bham.ac.uk), June 20, 2000.

My pictures (Canon S10) always look better after software sharpening. The camera has a built-in sharpening feature. Are you saying that I should use this feature all the time and forego software sharpening (post compression)?

Thanks.

-- Greg Philmon (gphilmon@yahoo.com), June 21, 2000.