My birthday was this weekend, which happened to coincide with Vermont’s tax-free holiday, so I did something I’ve never done before: I bought myself a birthday present — the brand-new Fuji FinePix HS10.
In fact, the Fuji HS10 is so new, it’s not even in stores yet. So I did several things I’ve never done before: I bought a product sight-unseen, I bought a product I hadn’t researched on the web first, and I bought a Fuji instead of a Canon, which has been my camera of choice for 20+ years.
What possessed me? Was I in a crazy birthday haze, my faculties soaked with purply serotonin short-circuiting the über-cautious consumerism that is my trademark?
I can’t deny I was in a good mood, but the fact is I’ve been researching Canons for the past six months. Before the advent of digital photography, I used to shoot with a 35mm Canon so I was looking to finally buy an SLR. I’ve been limping along with a Powershot for years and it was time to pony up the cash for a camera with more manual control and better output overall.
So then how the heck did I end up with a camera that’s not only not a Canon and but also not technically an SLR? Because of the video, of course.
After the TEI conference where I was switching madly between photo cam and video cam — and ultimately not shooting enough with either one — I decided that my camera wish list needed to include video, and not just any video but HD. If I was going to spend $500 on a camera, I wanted it all.
So on my birthday/VT tax-free day, I went to an excellent local store, LeZot Camera (crappy-looking website but great store). I told the guy I wanted to see a Canon SLR and that the icing on the cake would be that it shot HD video. Well, the Canon that does all this — the Rebel T1i — is a couple hundred dollars out of my price range at about $750. I was hoping that maybe I’d missed something in my intrepid yet uninformed research, but unfortunately I hadn’t: the Canon landscape looked exactly as I’d seen online.
Oh well, I told myself, I’ll wait a couple more years until the price comes down. I must have looked disappointed or, more likely, absolutely unwilling to buy the T1i when the LeZoti told me about the Fuji HS10 — he’d just seen it in a tradeshow and not only did it include all the shooting features I wanted, plus the HD video, but it also had a manual 30x optical zoom.
If your jaw isn’t on the ground at this last spec, don’t feel bad. Mine wasn’t either but it should have been. Until now, this level/type of zoom has been found only in detachable lenses; Fuji’s fixed lens twists like one of these to give you the control without the bulk. Which was another of my requirements: I wanted the smallest, lightest camera with the most functionality.
Of course I won’t know for certain how fantastic the Fuji is until I have the camera in my hands, shoot some pics and video, then download it all to my computer. Two weeks until the unboxing. Can’t wait!