Fujifilm Finepix F550 EXR Samples

The crops below show the performance of the Fuji Finepix F550 EXR compared against itself. The left column shows images taken in 16 megapixels EXR-HR mode and the right one shows images taken in 8 megapixels EXR-SN mode which is designed to produce lower-noise images buy using binning of adjacent same-color photosites.

All crops below are 100% from their respective camera taken at the highest image quality setting available. All other settings were left at their default values. These crops help determine which ISO settings can be acceptably used on these cameras. As noise increases, most cameras compensate with noise reduction which introduces softness. The point at which a print become unacceptably noisy is a matter of personal taste.

EXR-HR	EXR-SN
ISO 100	ISO 100
ISO 200	ISO 200
ISO 400	ISO 400
ISO 800	ISO 800
ISO 1600	ISO 1600

These crops show that Fuji managed an excellent implementation of its EXR-SN mode. By combining two adjacent pixels of the same color, the F550 EXR shows a gain of almost two stops in terms of noise, at the expense of 50% less resolution. Still, 8 megapixels is more than enough for the most common print sizes.