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Magazine advertising campaign heralds arrival of much-delayed but potentially significant new model from Fujifilm

It was announced back in February and plans to release it were repeatedly stalled, but Fujifilm UK today confirmed that the technically interesting Fujifilm F700 should start arriving in the shops by the end of this month. Evidence of this is a back page advert for he F700 in this week's Amateur Photographer magazine.

Why has there been so much interest surrounding the F700? It will be the first camera to feature Fujifilm's novel 4th-generation SuperCCD 'HiFi' SR sensor chip. SR chips use a pair of photodiodes per pixel site, one for sensing low to mid-range luminance and the other to sense bright luminance. The 'HiFi' analogy relates to bass/mid-range units, also known as 'woofers' and 'tweeters' in a HiFi speakers. It's the bright luminance lost in 'blown' or 'burned out' highlights that the SuperCCD SR chip is designed to preserve. If it works, the effect on many outdoor or flash pictures could be dramatic.

The F700 has a SuperCCD SR chip containing an array of 3.1 million pixel sites, each site containing a pair of photodiodes. In our book, that's a native resolution of 3.1 megapixels, but Fujifilm, as usual, is providing an output resolution of double that (6.2 megapixels).

We don't yet have pricing for this otherwise straightforward-looking camera with 3x zoom lens, but look forward to its arrival in a few weeks time.

Fujifilm UK home page.

Thanks go to Mark Goldstein over at Photography Blog for pointing out the F700 ad in Amateur Photographer this week.

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