I’ve had my F50fd for 2 weeks now, I am going to keep it, it’s just a walk-around camera for me and the quality is good enough, especially with a little bit of post-processing. Thought I’d share a few things about this digicam:

• One of the main reasons I went with the Fujifilm F50fd was the supposedly great noise control in high ISO sensitivity. This turned out to be a bit of a disappointment. I’ve seen outputs from the F30 and F31 and the 12MP F50fd is actually worse at ISO 1600 and above. It does go up to ISO 6400 but the quality is shit. At ISO 1600 it is usable, especially with some noise reduction in post-processing and black and white conversion. (Keep in mind that I am used to the high ISO performance of my 20D so I don’t think I can be pleased with any digicam.)
• It is 12MP, but unless you shoot at ISO100 with plenty of light, the full size pics look pretty bad. The outputs are great for web-use sizes though, so if you get this to take pics for forums (like waywt pics) or blog posts, it is great. There is even a blog-optimized setting for pics so you won’t even have to process them or downsize them.
• It has no orientation sensor, I find it a bit odd for a top-of-the-line digicam. The images don’t have EXIF tags for auto-rotation.
• LCD image preview has no histograms, like, NONE… I don’t think it has highlight overexposure warning either.
• The UI is extremely easy to use, I still haven’t opened the manual. It is very easy to adjust EVs, change ISO or flash settings while shooting. I like the UI a lot more than that of Canon or Sony digicams, no more moving dip switches for image reviews! I wish it had an easy way to go straight to 100% review, the Canon SD630 actually has that and it is pretty useful.
• Build quality is on the cheap side, but it is cheap at only $260 shipped from Amazon.
• the tripod mount is in the middle so that makes it possible to use lightweight cheapo pocket tripods (again waywt pics optimized!).
• the numeric part of the filenames always resets zero if you delete all your photos from the memory card, this is kindda annoying IMO.
• it now takes SD cards, I think before they only accepted xD.
• face detection (fd) is very useful when you ask people to take pictures for you, it works very well, it can find faces even at an angle.

I’ve posted some photos from the F50fd here, you can also find them in my Flickr stream, check the Photo Properties part on the photo page, it should show which camera I used.

Buy it here:

Technorati Tags: f50fd, fuji, fujifilm

Ask The VC – Why Are Venture Capitalists So Hard To Deal With?:

One of the questions that we get most often is “why are VCs such jerks?” or some sort of derivation thereof. Specifically, people complain about:

– VCs not returning calls / being unresponsive

– VCs not understanding how good of an investment my company is

– VCs stringing along entrepreneurs when they know they aren’t going to fund a deal

– VCs being “know it all board members”

– VCs being unapproachable in general

I won’t try to defend all VCs. In fact, I’ve seen all of this behavior from other VCs and I don’t condone it in any way. How does one avoid these behaviors? The key is picking good VCs to work with, but also to be self aware of your particular situation. I’ll try to address the particular complaints above by illustrating some situations that I’ve seen and also try to give you some insight into what might be rattling around in your VC’s head.

I especially like this one:

Issue 4: VCs being “know it all board members”

Why is this happening to me? This situation is rarely one-sided – it’s usually the fault of both VC and entrepreneur, but it’s usually between the following polar extremes:

1. The VC is a complete idiot, doesn’t pay attention to the company at all, only shows up for the board meetings and then sits there and espouses “wisdom for all to hear.”

2. The Entrepreneur always thinks he/she is correct and that “no one could possibly know more about my company than me” and completely ignores the VC who has experience across many different companies.