Fujifilm FinePix F200EXR and housing

FinePix F200EXR and housing, £469.99

With its impressive performance in low and contrasting light conditions, Fujifilm’s latest luxury compact has much to offer the underwater photographer.
I tried it out over a series of wreck dives where the visibility was about 5–10m – challenging conditions for a compact camera.

The camera has a 12-megapixel sensor, and features a 28mm wide-angle lens with 5x optical zoom, giving you the equivalent of 28–140mm on a DSLR – a good mid-range lens. There are several options for shooting underwater. The easiest is to select the ‘underwater’ mode and let the camera do the work. If you prefer greater control of the functions, you can put the camera on ‘manual’ and set the shutter speed, aperture and white balance yourself.

The EXR setting is one of the camera’s major selling points – it allows you to choose to take pictures with high resolution, high sensitivity or enhanced dynamic range. This is potentially useful for wide-angle underwater snappers. You can set the camera so that the sensor splits, capturing two images simultaneously at different sensitivity settings, which the camera combines to produce a single image with a greater dynamic range. This allows you to take photographs that include dark shadows and bright sunlight – the inside of a wreck with light streaming in through a porthole, for example.

If you’re not sure, there’s an option in the EXR setting to ask the camera to automatically select the mode according to the conditions. You can still manually adjust the white balance for underwater conditions within these modes.

It took me quite some time to get to grips with these different settings and the overly complex menu system. Not only that, but the main manual only comes on a CD (not ideal when you don’t have access to a computer), while the enclosed booklet explains just the basic functions and not the underwater modes – so it’s worthwhile familiarising yourself with the camera before getting in the water. However, the FX200EXR produces very sharp images, and the performance in contrasty conditions is as good as Fujifilm claims.

The housing, which is rated to 40m, is easy to use. The controls for the flash, self-timer, exposure and macro mode are all clearly labelled, with icons on the red plastic buttons – so even when you’re not familiar with the camera, using these while it is in the housing is simple. Other control buttons – including the playback and display buttons – are labelled less clearly, which meant that I couldn’t make out their functions while in the water.

A lever on the top of the camera adjusts the zoom, while a dial on the back changes the mode. When you change a setting, for example switching between modes, the new settings appear on the camera’s 3in screen – not just as a tiny icon, but nice and big. So if you switch to ‘M’, for example, it reminds you that this is the manual mode with the shutter speed and aperture’. I found this ideal underwater.

The housing isn’t as small as some others for compacts, so don’t plan on putting it in your BC pocket. There’s a weight to attach to the base of the housing to stop it floating around too much, but it is still positively buoyant. A strobe can be attached, but taking the setup apart again is more difficult.

On the whole, this compact and housing set is simple to use as a point-and-press camera, but has the capacity to produce quality pictures in challenging underwater conditions for more experienced photographers.

DIVE SAYS…
A sophisticated compact, but not cheap
Value 7 Performance 8

Contact
Fujifilm • 08700 841310 • www.fujifilm.co.uk