Product Reviews

Deciding upon the right camera can sometimes be a tricky process. Compact cameras may be small, but they often lack useful features and provide poor optical zooms. Conversely, SLR cameras are expensive and a little intimidating for photographic novices. What many of us need is something in between the two extremes and Fujifilm's brand new S6500fd claims to offer the best of both worlds.

Feature packed

Despite its SLR styling, the S6500fd doesn't allow you to change lenses like a true SLR. It does, however, have many of an SLR's features - far more than you'd find on a similarly priced compact.

For instance, there's a RAW mode, so you can take snaps without compressing the picture information and losing quality in the process. Photos taken in RAW mode will eat up more space on your memory card, but it's a must have if you want superlative results from your photos when editing them with photo-editing software. The 6.3-megapixel resolution isn't as high as some SLRs and compact cameras, but it's still plenty.

While you're stuck with the S6500fd's fixed lens, the optical zoom still puts similarly priced compact cameras to shame. Its 10.7x optical zoom is the equivalent of 28-300mm in 35mm terms - it's an impressive range that is more than worth the extra bulk. For example, framing a shot of a church and its grounds is easily done from just across the street, but from the same position you can zoom in to almost fill the frame with its weather vane. It's an impressive zoom that will cover most eventualities.

Familiar face

The really exciting feature is Fujifilm's face detection technology. Face detection identifies

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human subjects in an attempt to quickly focus on the appropriate areas of an image with the optimum exposure. If you often find your friends and relatives looking a little hazy, then you'll wonder how you ever lived without it. True to its promises, the S6500fd's auto focus locked onto subjects quickly and its face detection technology also focused on the correct part of the image. It's immensely useful for point-and-shoot moments, but there's still full control over exposure and focus modes if you need it.

But whether you take your photos in manual or automatic modes, the Fuji's wide ISO range has many uses. It allows you to take shots without resorting to using the flash and avoid blurry exposures in dim conditions. Most usefully, it can help prevent flash photography leaving your subjects with bleached faces against black backgrounds. Image noise is well controlled too, and despite ISO 1600 and 3200 being too noisy to make a really good print, its still a valuable option to have.

Quality control

Although it possesses many features of far pricier SLR cameras, the FinePix's image quality is still more akin to a high quality compact camera. High contrast scenes showed some evidence of purple fringing, which was a bit disappointing. However, there are no serious foibles and the automatic white balance was so reliable that despite the range of manual colour modes available, we rarely used them.

There are a couple of niggles that could have been easily rectified, though. As the S6500fd takes four AA batteries, it's easy to replace them on the fly, but you'd be advised to buy some rechargeables unless you fancy buying a new set every week. Another oversight is that the camera only accepts storage cards in xD format, which cost more than many formats. Ideally, we would have liked to have had the option to use sD or CF cards too.

Compact cameras often leave you paying for miniaturisation and good looks rather than a comprehensive array of features - in this regard the S6500fd wins hands down. You'll sacrifice a lot in terms of pocketability, but gain a level of control that rivals much more expensive cameras. If you want a pocket-sized fully automatic for hassle-free photography we'd look elsewhere, though.