Last year, the Fuji Finepix F550EXR has been beaten by the Canon PowerShot SX230hs in my test. In between, Fuji brought a small upgrade with the F600/660, which should solve the problem of too dark movies in low light. But problematic lens construction remained the same since the F300, and so did the problem with the border and corner softness.
This year Fujifilm released the new F770EXR which brings a new lens, a 20x zoom with 25-500mm. Such extreme zoom ranges are usually at the expense of image quality, so the expectations regarding image quality has been rather low. But despite the even larger focal range compared to it's predecessor, the first shots I saw on the internet, looked quite promising, much better than what I knew from the F550EXR.
A first test with a hedge demonstrated a significantly better result than last year with the F550. The corner and edge blurring is only minimal and for a zoom lens these are absolutely normal. The very good SX230 is not better in that area even zoom lenses of system cameras that cost more than the F770 alone are not free from it.
So this has been a very encouraging first test. Fuji got the main problem of the last F-generation under control, so I am looking forward to further testing of the F550.
