Throwback Thursday: Fujifilm’s SuperCCD EXR didn’t take off, but its legacy might live on in your pocket

 For Throwback Thursday we look at the Fujifilm F200 EXR, an overlooked compact whose ideas live on in modern smartphones

Launched in February 2009, the Fujifilm F200 EXR was an update to Fujifilm's popular "F" series of large(r than typical) sensor compacts. It had a 28-140mm equivalent zoom lens in front of a Type 1/1.6 (8x6mm) that was around 65% larger than most compacts of the day.

But it's the specifics of that sensor that make it interesting. The F200 EXR was the first instance of what proved to be the final iteration of Fujifilm's Super CCD concept.

Previous versions of the Super CCD concept had essentially rotated the standard Bayer filter pattern by 45 degrees: exploiting the fact that the standard Bayer layout has better resolution capture along diagonal axes than along its vertical or horizontals. Later versions partially masked some pixels to mean that they captured less light during a given exposure and hence didn't clip when the larger pixels did, allowing better highlight capture.

Click here to read our review of the Fujifilm F200 EXR

SuperCCD EXR expanded on both of these concepts. It continued to use the rotated Bayer pattern idea but this time re-arranged to put pairs of same-colored filters next to one another. This means you have pairs of adjacent pixels whose information can be easily combined. This, in turn, let Fujifilm offer three distinct modes:

• High Resolution (HR) mode– This would render a 12MP image using all the pixels

• High Sensitivity (SN) mode– This combined the output of pairs adjacent pixels in low light, to give 6MP images with improved signal-to-noise ratio

• Dynamic Range (DR) mode– This stopped the exposure early for alternate lines of pixels, meaning they were less prone to clipping. Adjacent pairs of bright and darker exposures were combined to give a 6MP image with better highlight retention.

Sound familiar? Because those three modes are essentially the three ways in which Quad Bayer and TetraCell sensors are used in modern smartphones. These have an oversized Bayer pattern (the same R,G,B,G pattern but expanded so that each color covers four photosites), rather than a rotated version. But they end up with sets of adjacent pixels that sample the same color. This means they're able to pixel-bin for improved performance in low light or expose alternate lines of their sensors for different periods of time, then combine the result.

So, even though the SuperCCD concept was eventually abandoned, some of the ideas in introduced are at the heart of many of the images from today's most popular smartphones. Even if the user isn't necessarily aware of that.

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About the Author: Richard graduated as a scientist but had a lot more fun writing and shooting for his university magazine. A number of years spent variously as a reporter, writer and editor on science and engineering titles combined his knowledge of science with his interest in images and words. But it was spotting the connections between emission spectra, white balance and all the nonsense he'd taught himself playing around in Photoshop that helped kindle an interest in digital photography. Searching for a camera led to him discovering DPReview and Richard was recruited by Phil Askey in 2007. He's been combining his love of photography, communication and attention to detail (pedantry?) ever since.He has unusually strong opinions about lenses for the APS-C format.

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