As to the S2, when I first saw files from that camera I wanted to toss my d2x. Truly beautiful files. Does anyone know if the S5 files re as nice? I ask because it had the D200 body, which was far better than the S2 body.
The only issue of the s2 is it's a cheap camera, but it works, works well.
The only issue with the s2 files is they are that fuji 6mpx interpolated to 12mpx and they tilt the senosr so sometimes diagonal lines might rasterize. You'll see it, nobody else will, though new post production processing will fix most of it.
The S2 jpegs are thick, like drum scanned film. You can literally be 3 stops under and pull them out.
My way of working with it was to do a basic white balance, then use lee filters for the color I wanted, in other words I treated it like transparency film.
The images I placed earlier were all shot this way. All three were from two large clients and the studio work was the first job we tethered from the video port of the camera to a 12" tv. It worked, they loved it, but it was early on with digital capture and the client "demanded" film in parallel. After the weeks shoot they only selected one film image, 20 something S2 images.
The guy leaning on the boat, I literally, pulled the jpeg out on location, uprezzed it, cleaned up a few spots and handed it to a client on a cd.
They printed it 4 days later.
This was studio work and I purposely blew the highlights, though this is a small jpeg from the shoot so it has a lot of compression.
I could kick myself as I gave the S2 to a friend when fuji gave me an s3 that wasn't the same. I briefly tested the S5 but found the look very different.
Simon,
Your going to love it, just don't pixel peep, look at the files as film, shoot it like film for the look you want out of camera and you'll be happy.