Kyocera Finecam S5R

The sandwiches are packed, the kid’s shoes are tied and the sunscreen is spread. You are ready to take the family on an all day hike. You want to take a camera but already feel like a pack mule with all the supplies. The Kyocera Finecam S5R is the perfect camera for this kind of situation. It offers a very small, tough aluminum case that won’t take up much space and will tolerate a little rough handling. It takes many great pictures without much thought on one battery charge.

The one thing a product brochure can’t tell you is if the camera takes good quality pictures. So this article “focuses” on the image. The Kyocera Finecam S5R is a 5-megapixel design with a 3x zoom. The 5MP means each image contains a tremendous amount of information to work with when planning to display, edit or print the image. The 5MP may seem like overkill to some people but having that much digital data is great for when you want to “zoom” in or crop the image after the shot has been taken (“fix it in post” is an often used term using in Hollywood to mean Post-production work). Even after removing an unwanted object in the background or cropping to improve the composition, there are plenty of pixels left to make high quality prints.

The overall image quality from the S5R is very pleasing. Colors are vibrant with little compression noise. The camera’s CCD does a good job with multiple colors without the bleeding of one color into the next. The auto gray scale and auto image setting circuits (shutter speed, f-stop, etc.) work well. The overall image has a minimal amount of compression noise (when set to Fine). (Note: a good way to look for overall image quality is to use your image viewing software to zoom in 200% on the image, look at solid color areas like the sky and shadows of buildings for pixel “noise”. Also look along straight edges like flag polls to see if there is any ringing [white lines next to dark ones]. Most camera manufacturers offer sample image on their web sites. Save these images on your computer and then try the method mentioned above.)

A key part of the image equation is the lens. The 3x zoom lens causes only minor amounts of lens flaring along the outside edges of the image while in the wide-angle position. However, there is a significant amount of barrel distortion (the curve of the horizon) in the wide-angle mode, usually seen with fisheye type lens. The good news is you can take great large group shots. The down side is you cannot use stitching software to create a panorama shot because the horizon is so curved the software cannot compensate. Zooming the lens eliminates this but means you will have to take more images to create the panorama shot.

The zoom control is very sensitive. The zoom motor moves quickly so it is very difficult to zoom in and out in small increments.

The camera offers a selectable Sharpness setting from –1, Normal, +1, +2, +3. Results from testing demonstrated that the circuit performs similar to the basic sharpness control on your TV. Changing the settings does not actually increase the amount of detail, it only alters the image to give the illusion that the image is sharper, usually by adding a small white halo next to dark lines. Too much of this can ruin the image. In the S5R the –1 setting appears to set the sharpness circuit to off. This is the setting I recommend. The Normal setting should be the highest setting you should ever use. Any setting over –1 starts to introduce noise in the image, increasing the visibility of JPEG compression artifacts.

I got the best results by shooting in the –1 mode. Once the image is downloaded to the computer, use a small amount of the Unsharp Masking feature in Photoshop, which improves overall detail and depth without increasing the JPEG noise. If you don’t have Photoshop, use the Normal setting in the camera.

The camera offers selectable resolutions with a choice of compression levels between Fine and Normal:

2560x1920
1600x1200
1280x960
640x480

All the resolutions take clean images except for the 640x480. At that setting the images are basically unusable due to down-scaling artifacts. The Fine setting is recommended. The Normal setting slightly increases compression artifacts, as would be expected.

The camera performs best in bright areas. Images in dark rooms are clean where the flash covers and the shadow area is relatively free of pixel noise. The flash is very weak, as would be expected from such a small camera. The biggest complaint in dark rooms is the auto-focus sensors do not work well. Many shots are out of focus and manual focusing is not possible since the rear LCD viewer does not show details in dark rooms. All auto-focus systems have a problem working in a dark room but this camera was weak in this area.

The camera offers the typical selectable macro focus setting and offers an “Infinity” focus setting. I found it puzzling why this would be needed since most auto-focus systems automatically go to the infinity setting with long shots. Testing this feature gave the impression that the image does look sharper on long distance shots. However, I could not tell if the results are due to a true increase in detail or that the auto-focus circuit is bypassed or that the electronic sharpness settings are increased. The verdict is to use the “infinity” setting when appropriate.

Another adjustment is for chroma level. This adjustment seemed unnecessary and should be left in the “Standard” setting.

Evaluation of the ASA adjustment yielded predictable results in that the 400ASA was grainer that the 100ASA setting.

The S5R has many of the features typical with this category of camera, including MPEG movie recording with sound and selectable AE modes. Using and working with the menus is fairly easy so you don’t need to keep the manual handy just to takes photos on your hiking trip. There are many cameras in this mini camera category so use the Best Stuff website to get the details. The Kyocera S5R is a good choice when you need a camera that is small, easy to use and takes great images.

www.kyoceraimaging.com

By Pete Halenbeck