Fujifilm Finepix F550 EXR Samples

Below are sample crops from an indoor photograph of a book-cover at each of the Fuji Finepix F550's ISO settings. A crop from the Nikon Coolpix P7000
Nikon Coolpix P7000 at the same ISO setting is shown next to the Fuji F550 EXR's crop. Images are all unmodified 100% crops from their respective cameras taken at the highest quality setting. The F550 EXR was set to P mode and 16 megapixels resolution, this is equivalent according to the manual to using Resolution-Priority mode.

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 result is that, while you can partly reduce noise at the expense of details, the maximum acceptable print size gets smaller as ISO is increased. The point at which a print become unacceptably noisy is a matter of personal taste.

Fuji Finepix F550 EXR	Nikon Coolpix P7000
ISO 100	ISO 100
ISO 200	ISO 200
ISO 400	ISO 400
ISO 800 ISO 800 EXR-SN (8MP)	ISO 800
ISO 1600 ISO 1600 EXR-SN (8MP)	ISO 1600
ISO 3200 ISO 3200 EXR-SN (8MP)	ISO 3200
ISO 6400	ISO 6400
ISO 12800	Right from the start the F550 EXR shows slightly more image noise than the Nikon P7000, the present image quality champion among compact digital cameras. The differences increases slowly at each ISO and by 1600, the P7000 shows a 2-stop lead. Keep in mind though that the P7000 uses a larger 10 megapixels sensor so gains by having bigger pixels and 60% less resolution. Looking at the 3 included EXR-SN samples which have 8 megapixels, we can see that the image quality is a lot closer. Given that the resolution is closer too, it may be more appropriate to compare image quality from those crops.