[font color=\'#000000\']I wanted to wait a day before I posted this information. Some may ask if I want some cheese with my whine, and I understand. However when you consider that 2400.00 is not a small piece of change, I figure some people out there may want to know this.
Since I have owned my S2, I have been overall greatly impressed by the image quality in that I have shot the D1x 15 months now and several digital bodies before that for 4 years. Before that I worked with film for at least 20 years. I have been always been in an amateur with photography, in that I don’t use it for my primary source of income. I have sold some of my work over the years, but never in a large scale. I can also say that these last 4 years have been by far the most interesting as the technology has grown in leaps and bounds.
I understand that all new products will undergo teething troubles; however I also expect that the company will attempt to address the concerns if they are valid, and not deny them.
Since the S2 was released, there have some concerns over various design issues and the like. Really not much has been said out overall image faults. However over the last two weeks various people have noticed the “patter or track” noise that the S2 can produce in certain images. Please check out
www.outbackphoto.com and look at the 09/01/02 entry in Uwe’s S2 diary. Since this noise is presented in a pattern or series of tracks it is very damaging to the overall image. You can almost always see it in areas of an image that were underexposed. I see it in my work in leaves or water areas. Sometimes it can be removed, but many times the removal process will damage the image enough that you can’t recover the details. To assume that you can always get the perfect exposure every time, is a wrong assumption, especially in outdoor work. Many times, I am faced with a situation where I have to underexpose an image to keep certain highlights from blowing out, knowing that I have several methods to recover or combine later in Photoshop.
As an attempt to assist Fuji with this problem, I complied a very detailed listing of images and wrote a very detailed explanation of the problem, i.e. how best to find it. This package was delivered to their tech support group. I was told yesterday that no one at Fuji was able to see the problem period. Now I know the image I sent had the effect and others have reported it on this forum and other sites. I have to say that to have a company just deny an issue exists is pretty disappointing. I can reproduce it anytime with my camera.
I wanted to post this so others will be both aware of the problem and be aware of how callous a company like Fuji can be.
Paul Caldwell
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