Sunday, April 15, 2012

F770EXR Review – Part 8 – First video at 1080p

In part 3, I walked to the local pond from the office at lunch for a few shots of the geese. Along the way, I shot some video here and there and at the end I got a nice video of mating pairs of geese jockeying for territory. Lots of head bobbing and squawking :-)

What I have discovered so far is that the F770EXR holds focus better at 1080p than did the F550EXR, which had to be shot at 720p to get usable video. But … Fuji giveth and they taketh away … the center AF trick of capturing still images to reestablish sharp focus at the long end no longer works. The images don’t interrupt the video any more, but because of that they don’t stimulate a refocus.

Which leaves us with continuous AF. And as I said … it works much better than the F550EXR, but still hunts too often. It is basically pretty crude when compared with Sony and Panny and Canon. Although I’d like to shoot all of these long zooms under similar circumstances to back that with real evidence.

Anyway … few cameras can be hand held reasonably well at 500mm, so I suppose one has to live with a few faults.

Have a look at the video … I added some background music because it is otherwise a little dull (deadly boring to be more accurate :-) … watch for the little turtle sunning itself on the traffic cone … and the band on the leg of the feeding goose. Cool details from 100 feet away … 500mm is not something to sneeze at.