Customer Reviews
A Strange Animal 
2008-05-23
I'm a huge fan of Fuji's sharpness and color reproduction (at least to my eyes)but as many of the reviews have stated it has its problems too. It has a pretty big CCD compared to many of the other cameras in its class which a huge plus. My biggest complaint with this camera is with the Flash, and its kid of silly. A pop up flash is Okay but there is no Flash on/off feature so if I want to disable the flash during a shot I have to push the whole flash back down. The write time and flash recycle is one of the slowest I've seen but there aren't too many occasions where I can't wait. I'm not sure if it is just my camera but it seems to have some "quirks" such as the LCD going from Bright to Dark, I don't know if it's a power saving feature or what. I was also disappointed in the fact that it didn't have an scene modes other than Portrait, Sports and Night. I don't use them too often but they can be useful to other people who just want to take a picture (e.g. My wife). At least it has a Manual Feature.
If it weren't for the lack of the Flash on/off feature and it's quirky behavior, I would have given it another star.
A good walk-around camera 
2008-04-24
This compact camera was announced on July 28, 2005 for Fuji's 2006 catalog, and was dropped from their 2008 catalog, a long run for a compact model camera. Fujifilm has dropped it's E-series, and none of their current compact models offer a comparable configuration. At the time of this writing, remaindered E900 stock is still available on the Internet for around $200, less than half its original retail price. A contemporary camera with a similar, albeit more fully featured, configuration would be the 12 MP Canon G9, at about $450.
The nine mega pixel "Super CCD" featured on this model caused a minor sensation when announced. This sensor is still being used in the Fujifilm S9600 model. Super CCD sensors are unique in that their pixels are arranged diagonally, rather than horizontally. This reduces aliasing along diagonal lines (at the cost of aliasing along vertical and horizontal lines, I would guess).
I considered purchasing this camera when it first came out, but opted instead for a dSLR model. But, now I wanted a compact walk-around camera for a project where a dSLR kit would be too much baggage. The E900 again came under consideration. I was attracted by these features:
RAW capture capability (I shoot everything in RAW).
2xAA battery power is cheap, lightweight and long-lasting (e.g., Sanyo Eneloop).
The high ratings for the E900 I read on internet camera review sites.
At just over nine ounces, batteries included, this camera fits my requirement for portability. It is too big to fit in my shirt pocket, but I avoid putting precision instruments in shirt pockets, anyway.
The camera market is driven by technology in the service of consumer tastes. Compact cameras are trending toward ever-smaller (including hi-res cameras in cell phones), while dSLR cameras are incorporating more consumer features, like "live view," image stabilization and face recognition. I guess I am a digital Luddite, because Minox-sized cameras do not appeal, nor do SLR cameras laden with techno-froufrou. Offer me a camera with extended dynamic range, higher sensitivity and greater resolution, and I am listening. If the camera will pay expressway tolls, it has some other consumer than me in mind.
The RAW capability of the Fujifilm E900 is seriously under-supported by the manufacturer, to the point of being counterproductive. Selecting RAW capture requires drilling deep into the setup menu on the camera. The RAW developing software included with the camera provides no image adjustments and outputs TIFF files at only 8-bit tonal depth, obviating all(!) the value of RAW capture. I was disappointed to find that the exposure bracketing feature is disabled in RAW capture mode.
I shoot RAW because I process all of my images in Photoshop, where Fujifilm RAW images, with their 12-bit tone depth, accommodate much greater manipulation before tones start to degrade. Also, using Adobe Camera Raw (ACR), I can impose the optimal white balance setting and realize another stop of dynamic range.
I can appreciate how most camera users would not find RAW capture to be of value. Most amateur photographers probably use $100 software to adjust their images. This software typically functions at 8-bit tonal depth, meaning the extra data captured in RAW is stripped away at the get-go. (Corel's Paint Shop Pro supports 16-bit editing, I have heard.) Recalling how cameras are a consumer-driven marketplace, it might make sense that Fuji has dropped RAW support from their current models, except for their Pro dSLR and two high-end "bridge" models.
Photographers serious about their work will much prefer to use dSLR cameras for the better optics and greater user control they provide, because the effort required to produce a "serious" image is about the same, regardless of the camera used. But, I wanted a walk-around camera that would at least approach dSLR image quality.
Here are the compromises/limitations I have discovered so far comparing images from the E900 to ones from my dSLR:
Noise in the shadows. Pixels can't decide what color they are.
Color noise. Again, pixels can't decide what color they are.
Chromatic aberrations (colored fringes along high contrast edges). I can compensate for some of this when I make my adjustments in ACR.
Range of f-stops is limited (f-8 is the highest value).
Macro works only at the widest focal length, producing "big nose" distortion.
The tiny pop-up strobe is only good for fill flash, and even then only at close range.
The camera has a big hunk of chrome bling on the grip, giving it the look of a '58 Roadmaster. I covered it up with a piece of gaffer tape.
I am surprised and delighted by the resolution of this 9-MP compact camera compared to my 8-MP dSLR, considering the glass used in each. I appreciate that I can get immediate exposure feed-back on the image I just shot (without switching to playback mode) in the form of a histogram and saturated pixels flashing on-and-off. I have added a picture illustrating this display to the gallery for this camera.
I am happy with this camera for the purposes I intend.
Camera died after 6 months. 
2008-04-04
At first I thought this was a great camera, the only downfall was the batteries would drain too quickly. It was also annoying that the batteries and picture card were under the same cover. I bought this camera in July 2006. Then in January 2007 it completely died on me. I couldn't even get the lens to close. I finally brought it to a repair shop and they said the motherboard went on it. The total cost for labor and parts would be $128. I checked and for the price this camera is selling for I'm not sure if it's worth it to repair.
Good Compromise 
2008-01-28
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.
Only Love Remains 2008-01-14
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.
Nice kick-around camera 2008-01-08
The Fuji FinePix E900 Digital Camera is the right choice for photo enthusiasts who want digital SLR quality, in a compact point-and-shoot body. Designed for the serious digital photograph
AND the aspiring enthusiast, the FinePix E900 takes digital photography to a higher level.
Its advanced Real Photo Technology combines advanced processing, better sensitivity and speed and a new Fujinon lens, for beautiful photos that mirror what your eyes will see. The built-in Anti-Blur program suppresses any blurring from a shaky camera, while the High Speed Shooting Mode means you always get the shot, no matter how fast the subject is moving. A new world of great digital photos has just opened up. 4x optical zoom, 7.6x digital zoom - 30.4x total range Mode dial for easy access to common shooting functions Full auto point and shoot mode 5 pre-programmed scene position modes - Anti-Blur, Natural Light, Portrait, Night and Landscape FinePix Viewer downloads photos to a PC each time you connect PictBridge lets you transfer directly to compliant printers Optional Lens & 43mm filter mount Requires 2 AA NiMH rechargeable batteries (wall charger included)
Horrible Customer Service!!! 
2007-12-23
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.
very disappointing purchase 2007-12-20
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.
One of the best all around digital cameras out! 2007-12-11
This camera is well worth the average $200 online in various stores, because it has features that make it a great camera for the family or the budding photographer! Even if you don't know much about photography, buying this camera for the price makes sense, because later on, when you wish you had a feature now that you know more, it will be there!
If you are not "into" photography, simply use the AUTO mode, if you want a little more control it offers it, if you want full control, it offers it, even manual focus! With 9 mega-pixels, you can get huge photos that can be cropped and still print out very nice at 8X10 or 5X7! :)
I love that the camera uses AA battery's and has memory card usage, so you can fill up a memory card, and pop in a new one. I am also VERY pleased with the video mode of this camera, it takes very good videos, that are better quality than my Nikon L3 or L4!
The only small complaint about videos I have is that you can't zoom in or our while shooting, but that's ok, for the good quality, I'll deal with it! :)
Overall, I love this camera and am having fun with it, and for the price, it totally satisfies me! I doubt I'll need another camera for a long, long time! :)
Perfection and My Seller was Perfection! 2007-10-29
I bought mine from RockettMart. Not only is the camera perfect for me the seller was great and I would recommend him to anyone, anytime. He was very customer oriented! As for the camera, it is perfect for someone who wants to carry a camera with them and be able to pull it out and take pictures anywhere, anytime. I am absolutely in LOVE with this camera! I had a Nikon professional grade digital camera, but you could not prie my Fuji E900 from my hands. Wonderful Picture, Perfect Camera! I just wish it came with extra batteries and a case. Also, the only cards it accepts are the xD cards and they are expensive, but overall WELL WORTH THE MONEY! I don't know why it is not still priced at 600.00! ABSOLUTELY IN LOVE WITH THIS CAMERA AND WILL NEVER GO BACK! I WILL ONLY BUY NEWER MODELS AS THEY COME AVAILABLE! HIGHLY, HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!
