Product Reviews

If you've got £400 to spend on a digital camera, you're spoiled for choice, with lots of DSLRs to choose from; click Labs to read our verdicts on the latest. Fujifilm, however, offers an alternative with the new S100FS, a compact with high resolution and a huge zoom. Can a fixed lens camera really compete with SLRs? Yes, it can.

The S100FS is as big and heavy as a DSLR, but the ergonomic design is comfortable to hold. It also provides plenty of room for controls, and Fujifilm has covered every available space with buttons, dials and switches. This might bewilder some users, but serious snappers will appreciate that single-purpose controls under your fingers are much quicker than delving through menus.

The S100FS's best feature is its lens, which starts at a true wide angle 28mm focal length and goes all the way to a 14.3x zoom. To achieve that with a DSLR, you'd need two lenses. The macro mode is just as impressive, focusing on subjects just 1cm away. Optical image stabilisation is built in to counteract camera shake, which is essential with such a big zoom, but didn't work as reliably in our tests as we'd have liked, only keeping 25% of shots sharp at the full zoom extension with a 1/60 second shutter speed. Fortunately, it's easy to take multiple photos to increase the chances of getting the perfect shot. The S100FS takes one shot per second in its standard shooting mode - faster than any other compact we've tested. Power up, autofocus and flash are quick too. It's a shame the continuous shooting mode still only offers 1fps, but you can take a burst

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of seven shots at 2.9fps, or 6.7fps if you reduce the resolution to 3 megapixels.

The S100FS's sensor is bigger than those used in other ultra-zoom cameras. This helps it measure light more accurately, producing sharper details and less noise (graininess). The result was the best image quality we've seen from a non-SLR camera. The detail in brightly lit shots often put the models in last month's DSLR group test to shame. Noise levels weren't as low as with the DSLRs, which use even bigger sensors. Increasing the ISO setting enables shooting in lower light at the expense of noise; at ISO 400, the Fujifilm's sensor made fine textures such as skin look a touch scruffy, but even at ISO 1600, shots were surprisingly passable.

Chromatic aberrations were more of a concern. When the red, green and blue elements of the image don't line up perfectly towards the edges, due to the way light is bent by the lens, you get a blurry halo of discoloration on contrasty lines. It's not uncommon among big zoom cameras, but the S100FS suffers worse than most. It rarely spoiled our photos, but when it arose it was hard to ignore.

Light and shade

A couple of digital technologies have been added to boost image quality. One is Film Simulation, which imitates the colours produced by Fujifilm's Provia and Velvia film stock. Provia is the default, producing rich but natural-looking colours. Velvia is more saturated and contrasty, good for boosting muted colours in distant subjects. There are two more modes, Soft and Portrait, and although the difference is fairly subtle, it's a welcome feature.

Dynamic range processing is a way of using different ISO speeds for darker and brighter parts of the same photo to capture a wider range of colours. We found shadows were rarely affected, but highlight recovery was extremely effective.

The chromatic aberration problem is disappointing, and the only real weakness in an outstand-ing camera. The S100FS is maybe a little pricey: Sony's A200K with an extra 75-300mm lens would give you SLR quality and the same zoom range for only about £50 more. But if you don't want to worry about changing lenses, or need macro and video capture, the S100FS is a great choice.