Customer Rating: 
Summary: Good Compromise
Comment: This camera is larger than a compact, smaller than an SLR and has more pixels than most. It fits the hand well and is easy to hold and carry. It is very flexible, from fully auto to manual and everything in between. I have one gig of memory in it and it will take over 250 pictures at the highest pixel setting. The batteries seem to last forever and I've taken several hundred pictures, including flash without recharging. It works well in available light conditions and I seldom use flash unless it's actually dark. This camera will last me until I eventually replace it with an SLR.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Only Love Remains
Comment: I have had mine for about nine months. It's an interesting thing, a cheap compact digital camera with a very high resolution for its price bracket, a full range of manual photography controls, and a RAW mode that lets you apply all the image processing yourself. It has some quirks and overall I was both impressed and a little disappointed with it. It feels like a budget digital camera body/lens with the heart of a mid-range fixed-lens quasi-SLR. You've probably read lots of reviews on the internet, and I won't reiterate them. In general the camera doesn't seem to have much of a following, it's rarely mentioned on websites, and I assume it has been discontinued. It is just barely mentioned on Fuji's website. I believe it was the last of Fuji's E-series cameras.
On the positive sise, it has a non-interpolated nine megapixel resolution, which is still competitive nowadays. Nine megapixels is overkill for most applications, but it's very useful if you like to crop the images, because they remain high-resolution even after you've chopped half of the picture away. You can go down to five, three, or two megapixels, and VGA. The nine megapixel resolution has normal and fine JPG options, the others do not. In RAW mode a 1gb XD card stores 54 images. 9mp fine gets you 228 pictures, the rest hover around 1,000 pictures, give or take a few hundred.
The camera is small and light, and fits into a pocket easily. There is a full range of manual photography options. You can set the shutter speed, aperture, ISO level, there are various autofocus modes, and you can bracket the exposure, although you can only bracket by a maximum of one f-stop. You can shoot RAW. You can have a live histogram display on the LCD screen, although you have to hold down a button. Startup time is very quick, the zoom and autofocus are fairly quiet although not silent. You don't hear them in a crowd. The camera runs on 2xAA batteries, which are available in every shop in the world. The camera comes with a pair of batteries and a charger, which is handy. It uses tiny XD cards which can be had cheaply online. Windows XP sees the camera as a standard external storage device, rather like a USB memory stick, so you can just drag and drop the pictures onto your PC rather than having to use proprietary software. In fact you can use the camera as a USB stick, if you want, you can use it to carry MP3 files around, such as Paul McCartney's 1986 album Press to Play, which is fully as bad as the critics say, it's awful. I imagine he wrote "However Absurd" as a copy of "I am the Walrus", but he got it all wrong.
You set the custom white balance by photographing e.g. a grey card, and using that as a template. You cannot however take several pictures and use them as white balance templates, as in some professional cameras, but at least you have a custom option. Alternatively you can shoot RAW and set the white balance later on.
The image quality has been covered extensively on the internet. In low ISO modes using the camera's image processing, the image quality is very good in daylight, not bad indoors, but the camera has an odd shutter speed limitation that bothers me. I will write about this later. At 200 ISO and up the noise reduction gives everything an unpleasant plastic quality that resembles the work of George Seurat. The noise reduction algorithm tends to make the images look grainy in an unpleasant way. If you shoot flat surfaces such as walls and skies etc it's not so bad, but detailed objects suffer. If however you shoot with a lower ISO mode, but with a longer shutter speed, it's not so bad, indeed the low-light image quality is impressive if you use a tripod. Part of the reason I am so harsh on the camera's image quality is that the image flaws are very apparent when viewed at 1:1 on the screen, because the pictures are so large. If you crop the picture and then squash it down for the internet, say 1024x768, the grain isn't nearly as noticeable. If you shoot RAW you can bypass the noise reduction entirely. With RAW at ISO 80 there's a certain amount of grain, but it's not unpleasant grain, it has a film-like quality. The camera takes a few seconds to save each RAW file. I believe it interpolates them to 18mp and then de-interpolates them back down to 9mp again, which must take time.
Battery life seems to be good. I have taken it with me around and about, and shot a couple of hundred pictures a time, at nine megapixels, with enough juice left over to look at them, download them, and fiddle with the camera afterwards, using 2500 Ni-MH batteries. It's not a problem to carry around a spare set of AAs, or buy them, or borrow them.
The camera has some problems. The lens has a slightly wider field of view than other compact cameras, which is theoretically great, except that it distorts around the edges. If you take a shot of a painting, for example, the edges of the painting bulge out a little bit. You can fix this with software but it's a bind. The lens doesn't cope well with flare, so if you shoot a night scene with streetlights the lights will have stars coming out of them, and they will probably have a purple cast. There's a lot of purple fringing around the edges of things. I wish that Fuji had used a better lens. You can fix most of these problems with software, but as I say, it's boring to do so.
The maximum shutter time is fifteen seconds, at least in manual mode. In practice, if you set the camera to P or AUTO the maximum shutter time is 1/4 second, which isn't long enough at f2.8 if you want to take shots indoors without a flash (perhaps you have a tripod, or a very steady hand, or a steady beer glass, and you don't want to blind people). You could use shutter priority mode, in which case the maximum shutter speed is three seconds, which is not such a problem but why the limitation? It's a shame there isn't a simple automatic setting that lets you just point and shoot without limiting the maximum shutter speed. That's one point in favour of my old Olympus XA, or Yashica Electro. With those cameras you press the button and PAF, the shutter stays open as long as it needs to stay open.
There are some minor niggles. The flash isn't motorised, and so you have to manually open and close it. After you take a flash picture, the camera shows you the picture and then the screen goes blank for a second or so, presumably waiting for the flash to recharge. The body feels lightweight and hollow. It's very plastic, with some silvery plastic bits that look silly. There's a gap around the USB port which looks as though it will let dust into the camera's innards. The master program dial feels flimsier than the equivalent Canon Powershot dial, and doesn't click as positively. I often find myself pulling the Finepix out of a pocket, to find that it has flipped to one of the other shooting modes.
If you set the camera to take a time delay exposure, subsequent exposures do not use time delay, and so you have to set time delay over and over again. This sounds picky, but it's a real problem if you're taking a lot of product photographs, perhaps using the macro mode. You want as little camera shake as possible, and the self-timer is ideal for this, but with the E900 you have to press MENU RIGHT UP MENU after every single shot. Not fun if you have to take several dozen pictures.
A final niggle is that the option to shoot RAW is buried in one of the setup menus, rather than being right at the top level. You've probably read this complaint in all the other reviews. My guess is that most people who buy this camera do so in order to shoot RAW, and so they notice how fiddly it is to select. If you want to shoot at five megapixels or change to 3:2 aspect ratio there is a dedicated image quality menu button. But for RAW you have to press MENU DOWN DOWN DOWN DOWN DOWN SET DOWN DOWN DOWN DOWN DOWN DOWN DOWN DOWN RIGHT UP SET, and the same again to turn it off.
Oddly, and this isn't really a criticism, the wider 3:2 aspect ratio setting produces images that have a greater horizontal resolution than the standard 4:3 aspect ratio. It's as if the camera is expanding the pictures outwards rather than just cropping off the top of bottom. I'm not complaining, I'm just curious.
In summary the E900 is, or was, very impressive for the price. It feels flimsy and you'll never have people cooing at it, asking you to let them have a go, but it does the job for snapshots especially if you shoot RAW. The two big problems for me are the lens, and the odd 1/4 second exposure limitation. Given that digital cameras have come down in price over the last year it might be better to get an equivalent Powershot, even if it has a lower resolution. I find that nine megapixels seems like overkill, and I end up cropping most of my pictures and then sizing them down anyway. In theory I could make big prints, but I wouldn't with this camera because of the purple fringing and unpleasant noise reduction.
As a footnote, there's an extension mount and a pair of accessory lenses. The mount feels flimsy and wobbles. The telephoto lens is limited by the shutter speed limitation as above - and it's not very telephoto. The wideangle lens is silly but fun. It's totally impractical, large and heavy, and unbalances the camera, and the images are even more distorted than usual, but it attracts attention. It's not a fisheye though. You can theoretically attach filters and so forth to the extension mount, if you have a 43mm filter or adapter. Avoid Paul McCartney's Press to Play at all costs.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Nice kick-around camera
Comment: Have been very pleased with this camera in the month I've used it. Bought it for my wife who uses it as a point-and-shoot. Everything about it is easy - 2 AA bateries - simple controls - 9 MP - put a 2GB memory card in and taken many pictures and videos without any problem. Some problems - image stabilization - mode wheel moves too easily - power adapter not included.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Horrible Customer Service!!!
Comment: The camera is fine as long as nothing goes wrong. Fuji has the worst customer service I have ever delt with. They pass you from one person to another and do everything they can not to help you. Be prepared to deal with the worst customer service in the business. I really hope this helps you.
Customer Rating:
Summary: very disappointing purchase
Comment: I had a film-based SLR camera that I had invested a lot of money, and just hadn't committed to buying a digital camera yet. When I was burglarized and my camera equiptment was stolen, I figured it was time to make the switch to digital. I did much research online, and finally decided on the Fujimilm E900. When I first got the camera I was impressed with the image quality. To date, that's the only thing I've been impressed with. Pictures are often blurry, the flash is too bright, battery life is quickly eaten up, and worst of all, I've gone through three XD memory cards in this camera. Which, are quite expensive. For some reason unbeknownst to me, this camera seems to render the cards un-usable after just a couple months. For the cost, I am EXTREMELY disappointed with this camera. Save your money and purchase a $100 Kodak, Canon, or HP. I use all three at my work very often and have had minimal issues with any of them.
Summary: Good Compromise
Comment: This camera is larger than a compact, smaller than an SLR and has more pixels than most. It fits the hand well and is easy to hold and carry. It is very flexible, from fully auto to manual and everything in between. I have one gig of memory in it and it will take over 250 pictures at the highest pixel setting. The batteries seem to last forever and I've taken several hundred pictures, including flash without recharging. It works well in available light conditions and I seldom use flash unless it's actually dark. This camera will last me until I eventually replace it with an SLR.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Only Love Remains
Comment: I have had mine for about nine months. It's an interesting thing, a cheap compact digital camera with a very high resolution for its price bracket, a full range of manual photography controls, and a RAW mode that lets you apply all the image processing yourself. It has some quirks and overall I was both impressed and a little disappointed with it. It feels like a budget digital camera body/lens with the heart of a mid-range fixed-lens quasi-SLR. You've probably read lots of reviews on the internet, and I won't reiterate them. In general the camera doesn't seem to have much of a following, it's rarely mentioned on websites, and I assume it has been discontinued. It is just barely mentioned on Fuji's website. I believe it was the last of Fuji's E-series cameras.
On the positive sise, it has a non-interpolated nine megapixel resolution, which is still competitive nowadays. Nine megapixels is overkill for most applications, but it's very useful if you like to crop the images, because they remain high-resolution even after you've chopped half of the picture away. You can go down to five, three, or two megapixels, and VGA. The nine megapixel resolution has normal and fine JPG options, the others do not. In RAW mode a 1gb XD card stores 54 images. 9mp fine gets you 228 pictures, the rest hover around 1,000 pictures, give or take a few hundred.
The camera is small and light, and fits into a pocket easily. There is a full range of manual photography options. You can set the shutter speed, aperture, ISO level, there are various autofocus modes, and you can bracket the exposure, although you can only bracket by a maximum of one f-stop. You can shoot RAW. You can have a live histogram display on the LCD screen, although you have to hold down a button. Startup time is very quick, the zoom and autofocus are fairly quiet although not silent. You don't hear them in a crowd. The camera runs on 2xAA batteries, which are available in every shop in the world. The camera comes with a pair of batteries and a charger, which is handy. It uses tiny XD cards which can be had cheaply online. Windows XP sees the camera as a standard external storage device, rather like a USB memory stick, so you can just drag and drop the pictures onto your PC rather than having to use proprietary software. In fact you can use the camera as a USB stick, if you want, you can use it to carry MP3 files around, such as Paul McCartney's 1986 album Press to Play, which is fully as bad as the critics say, it's awful. I imagine he wrote "However Absurd" as a copy of "I am the Walrus", but he got it all wrong.
You set the custom white balance by photographing e.g. a grey card, and using that as a template. You cannot however take several pictures and use them as white balance templates, as in some professional cameras, but at least you have a custom option. Alternatively you can shoot RAW and set the white balance later on.
The image quality has been covered extensively on the internet. In low ISO modes using the camera's image processing, the image quality is very good in daylight, not bad indoors, but the camera has an odd shutter speed limitation that bothers me. I will write about this later. At 200 ISO and up the noise reduction gives everything an unpleasant plastic quality that resembles the work of George Seurat. The noise reduction algorithm tends to make the images look grainy in an unpleasant way. If you shoot flat surfaces such as walls and skies etc it's not so bad, but detailed objects suffer. If however you shoot with a lower ISO mode, but with a longer shutter speed, it's not so bad, indeed the low-light image quality is impressive if you use a tripod. Part of the reason I am so harsh on the camera's image quality is that the image flaws are very apparent when viewed at 1:1 on the screen, because the pictures are so large. If you crop the picture and then squash it down for the internet, say 1024x768, the grain isn't nearly as noticeable. If you shoot RAW you can bypass the noise reduction entirely. With RAW at ISO 80 there's a certain amount of grain, but it's not unpleasant grain, it has a film-like quality. The camera takes a few seconds to save each RAW file. I believe it interpolates them to 18mp and then de-interpolates them back down to 9mp again, which must take time.
Battery life seems to be good. I have taken it with me around and about, and shot a couple of hundred pictures a time, at nine megapixels, with enough juice left over to look at them, download them, and fiddle with the camera afterwards, using 2500 Ni-MH batteries. It's not a problem to carry around a spare set of AAs, or buy them, or borrow them.
The camera has some problems. The lens has a slightly wider field of view than other compact cameras, which is theoretically great, except that it distorts around the edges. If you take a shot of a painting, for example, the edges of the painting bulge out a little bit. You can fix this with software but it's a bind. The lens doesn't cope well with flare, so if you shoot a night scene with streetlights the lights will have stars coming out of them, and they will probably have a purple cast. There's a lot of purple fringing around the edges of things. I wish that Fuji had used a better lens. You can fix most of these problems with software, but as I say, it's boring to do so.
The maximum shutter time is fifteen seconds, at least in manual mode. In practice, if you set the camera to P or AUTO the maximum shutter time is 1/4 second, which isn't long enough at f2.8 if you want to take shots indoors without a flash (perhaps you have a tripod, or a very steady hand, or a steady beer glass, and you don't want to blind people). You could use shutter priority mode, in which case the maximum shutter speed is three seconds, which is not such a problem but why the limitation? It's a shame there isn't a simple automatic setting that lets you just point and shoot without limiting the maximum shutter speed. That's one point in favour of my old Olympus XA, or Yashica Electro. With those cameras you press the button and PAF, the shutter stays open as long as it needs to stay open.
There are some minor niggles. The flash isn't motorised, and so you have to manually open and close it. After you take a flash picture, the camera shows you the picture and then the screen goes blank for a second or so, presumably waiting for the flash to recharge. The body feels lightweight and hollow. It's very plastic, with some silvery plastic bits that look silly. There's a gap around the USB port which looks as though it will let dust into the camera's innards. The master program dial feels flimsier than the equivalent Canon Powershot dial, and doesn't click as positively. I often find myself pulling the Finepix out of a pocket, to find that it has flipped to one of the other shooting modes.
If you set the camera to take a time delay exposure, subsequent exposures do not use time delay, and so you have to set time delay over and over again. This sounds picky, but it's a real problem if you're taking a lot of product photographs, perhaps using the macro mode. You want as little camera shake as possible, and the self-timer is ideal for this, but with the E900 you have to press MENU RIGHT UP MENU after every single shot. Not fun if you have to take several dozen pictures.
A final niggle is that the option to shoot RAW is buried in one of the setup menus, rather than being right at the top level. You've probably read this complaint in all the other reviews. My guess is that most people who buy this camera do so in order to shoot RAW, and so they notice how fiddly it is to select. If you want to shoot at five megapixels or change to 3:2 aspect ratio there is a dedicated image quality menu button. But for RAW you have to press MENU DOWN DOWN DOWN DOWN DOWN SET DOWN DOWN DOWN DOWN DOWN DOWN DOWN DOWN RIGHT UP SET, and the same again to turn it off.
Oddly, and this isn't really a criticism, the wider 3:2 aspect ratio setting produces images that have a greater horizontal resolution than the standard 4:3 aspect ratio. It's as if the camera is expanding the pictures outwards rather than just cropping off the top of bottom. I'm not complaining, I'm just curious.
In summary the E900 is, or was, very impressive for the price. It feels flimsy and you'll never have people cooing at it, asking you to let them have a go, but it does the job for snapshots especially if you shoot RAW. The two big problems for me are the lens, and the odd 1/4 second exposure limitation. Given that digital cameras have come down in price over the last year it might be better to get an equivalent Powershot, even if it has a lower resolution. I find that nine megapixels seems like overkill, and I end up cropping most of my pictures and then sizing them down anyway. In theory I could make big prints, but I wouldn't with this camera because of the purple fringing and unpleasant noise reduction.
As a footnote, there's an extension mount and a pair of accessory lenses. The mount feels flimsy and wobbles. The telephoto lens is limited by the shutter speed limitation as above - and it's not very telephoto. The wideangle lens is silly but fun. It's totally impractical, large and heavy, and unbalances the camera, and the images are even more distorted than usual, but it attracts attention. It's not a fisheye though. You can theoretically attach filters and so forth to the extension mount, if you have a 43mm filter or adapter. Avoid Paul McCartney's Press to Play at all costs.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Nice kick-around camera
Comment: Have been very pleased with this camera in the month I've used it. Bought it for my wife who uses it as a point-and-shoot. Everything about it is easy - 2 AA bateries - simple controls - 9 MP - put a 2GB memory card in and taken many pictures and videos without any problem. Some problems - image stabilization - mode wheel moves too easily - power adapter not included.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Horrible Customer Service!!!
Comment: The camera is fine as long as nothing goes wrong. Fuji has the worst customer service I have ever delt with. They pass you from one person to another and do everything they can not to help you. Be prepared to deal with the worst customer service in the business. I really hope this helps you.
Customer Rating:
Summary: very disappointing purchase
Comment: I had a film-based SLR camera that I had invested a lot of money, and just hadn't committed to buying a digital camera yet. When I was burglarized and my camera equiptment was stolen, I figured it was time to make the switch to digital. I did much research online, and finally decided on the Fujimilm E900. When I first got the camera I was impressed with the image quality. To date, that's the only thing I've been impressed with. Pictures are often blurry, the flash is too bright, battery life is quickly eaten up, and worst of all, I've gone through three XD memory cards in this camera. Which, are quite expensive. For some reason unbeknownst to me, this camera seems to render the cards un-usable after just a couple months. For the cost, I am EXTREMELY disappointed with this camera. Save your money and purchase a $100 Kodak, Canon, or HP. I use all three at my work very often and have had minimal issues with any of them.
Fujifilm Finepix E900 9MP Digital Camera with 4x Optical Zoom (Black) Reviews: Page 2 of 14
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