Lungfish: Fujifilm FinePix S2 Pro

It seems oddly appropriate to kick off some intermittent posting on this dusty blog with a digital fossil that was not very fossilized when I started here back in '07. Heck, in 2007, the Fujifilm FinePix S2 Pro was barely dead; it didn't exit the catalog until the end of 2003, replaced by the S3 Pro.

Fuji was an early player in the digital photography world. In fact, when legendary German camera brand Leica decided to dip their toe in the consumer digital market, their first offerings were re-skinned Fujifilm digital cams.

During those early years, digital cameras were mostly novelty toys and the few professional digital cameras for use by photojournalists and such were collaborations between Kodak and film camera makers like Nikon and Canon, grafting a digital sensor made by the former onto a conventional film camera body made by the latter.

That early era of Frankenstein DSLRs would seem to have come to an end with Nikon and Canon launching their own entirely in-house offerings in 1999-2001, but there was one holdout.

See, Fujifilm was eager to get in on this DSLR action, and they had some interesting sensor technology to offer the market, but they didn't have a modern autofocus single lens reflex camera , having essentially bailed on the 35mm SLR market in the Eighties. So Fuji turned to a deal with Nikon, who would supply the actual camera bits, onto which Fuji would graft the digital sensor and hardware to make it work.

Fuji had worked with Nikon before, producing sensors for the company's early "E-series" DSLRs. Further, using Nikon hardware for their own DSLR launch would let Fuji buyers immediately piggyback off the vast Nikon F-mount lens library, so it seemed a win-win.

The initial offering from this pairing was the FinePix S1 Pro, which was built on a Nikon N60 body and had two marketing problems: First, asking people to shell out $3500 for a DSLR built on the chassis of a $300 entry-level film SLR is kind of a big ask. Second, Fuji marketing stumbled badly in the description of the sensor.

Fuji's SuperCCD sensor had 3.1 million photodiodes, but rather than arranging them horizontally & vertically, they were in diagonal rows and the resulting image was interpolated into a 6.2 megapixel image...so Fuji marketed the S1 as a 6.2MP camera. At the time, the $3,000 Canon D30 had a 3.1MP sensor and the $5,500 Nikon D1 had 2.7, so this was a big deal, at least until everyone started complaining about the actual number of photodiodes.

At any rate, the S1 Pro was succeeded in 2002 by the S2 Pro which was an upgrade in several ways. Importantly, it used the much more high-end Nikon N80 as the base camera, which made it feel a lot less chintzy and offered much-improved capabilities over the downmarket N60. Second, the new iteration of the SuperCCD had a 6.1MP sensor that, using the same interpolation method, turned out images of a jaw-dropping (for the time) 12MP resolution.

While the S2 was a modest success and was itself succeeded by a couple more iterations of Nikon-based cameras with Fuji sensors, Fuji eventually abandoned the DSLR market in '09 to concentrate on its mirrorless offerings.

A friend noticed this S2 Pro in a pawn shop, where it had languished for a while with a $50 price tag before moving to the bargain table, where it was scooped up along with several old video game carts and one of the old swivel-lens Nikon Coolpix cameras, the whole lot going for a Jackson. Not having much in the way of Nikon glass and knowing my love for weird old cameras, he passed the S2 Pro along.

It's an interesting artifact of its era. Its Frankenstein nature becomes apparent in that the Nikon camera part still runs on the same 2 CR123 batteries as a regular N80, but there's also a pull-out tray for four AA cells to power the grafted-on Fuji digital bits.

There are two card slots, but unlike modern systems, you have to decide in the menu whether you want to record to the SmartMedia or the CF card bay. It won't record to both simultaneously.

SmartMedia is a pretty well dead format, kept alive mostly because apparently some keyboards (the musical instrument, not the input device) use them. The largest SmartMedia cards only ran to 128MB, and I found a new-old-stock Fuji 32MB one on Amazon. Shooting in 12-bit CCD RAW, the 32MB card will hold precisely two images. Fortunately I have plenty of smallish CF cards formatted in FAT16 lying around from the D1x.

The top plate, at first glance, is straight-up Nikon N80. The difference is the Mode Dial, which has been replaced with one that adds the self-explanatory "ISO", whereby you adjust sensitivity by twiddling the Command Dial with the Mode Dial in this position, and the more cryptic "CSM", which puts you in the FinePix's Custom Settings Menu.

On the back of the camera is a small monochrome LCD for toggling through basic camera operations, as well as displaying ISO and resolution. Below that is a 1.8" color LCD for reviewing photos and the camera's basic setup menus: time & date, card formatting, CF/SmartMedia, color space, resolution, and suchlike.

One last feature that seems odd compared to modern DSLRs is the settings menu for the rear display. After every photo you can either have it off; set it to "postview", which is what we would call "preview" nowadays, showing the image you just took; set it to "preview", where it will display the image you just took and not actually record it until you press the F2 button; and "preview + histogram", which is what it sounds like.

I was stumped at first because it wasn't recording the pictures I had taken. This was because I had the camera set to "preview" using my current understanding of the term. Oops.

Once I got it figured out, though, I was pretty happy with the performance of the old SuperCCD...