Product Reviews

The Z100fd is a strong contender for the best-looking camera ever to grace the pages of Shopper. The brown finish resembles varnished wood, and it's also available in black and white, bright pink or a metallic-olive finish. The Z icon illuminates as you slide back the front cover to reveal the lens, and the slim design adds to its appeal. At the back is a 2.7in, 230,000-pixel screen and a selection of buttons.

Slim cameras often have room for only slim batteries, and sure enough the Z100fd's battery life is disappointing at 231 shots in our test, which is far short of the 400-shot average. An additional battery will set you back around £20. However, Fujifilm hasn't skimped in other areas, cramming an impressive number of features into the camera.

The lens has a 5x zoom range for greatly improved detail when shooting distant subjects. High zoom settings increase the likelihood of blur due to camera shake, so it's great to see that optical image stabilisation is built into the sensor. However, it didn't fare particularly well in our tests, keeping less than half of our shots blur-free at a 1/30-second shutter speed and a 100mm zoom position. This could be a basic limitation of Fujifilm's stabilisation technology, but we suspect it's more likely to be because the Z100fd's ultra-slim design makes it harder to hold steady compared with chunkier cameras.

The most surprising feature is infrared communication. This means that you could take a photo with the Z100fd and beam it to a mobile phone to send as a picture message or in an email, giving much better results than any camera phone can muster. However, infrared is rare among current mobile phones, and even

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fewer support the IrSimple protocol that the Z100fd requires. Fujifilm's website suggests that the feature is designed for transfers to other similarly equipped FinePix cameras, but we can't see much appeal in doing that.

The Z100fd introduces a new menu system, which is a significant step backwards from previous layouts. Pressing the Menu button presents a list of shooting modes and scene presets, among which is an option labelled Menu that presents the usual exposure compensation, ISO and white balance options. However, getting to these options takes a lot of button pushes. This is particularly frustrating because the camera wastes its dedicated buttons on image stabilisation and face detection on/off controls. There's rarely any benefit in switching these off, so the buttons exist more to show off these features than to present the user with useful controls. Considering that this is clearly a point-and-shoot camera, it's also disappointing that the face detection system is the older implementation rather than Fujifilm's more sophisticated updated version, as seen in its F50fd (What's New, Shopper 240).

Fujifilm's compact cameras aren't known for their fast performance, and the Z100fd doesn't rock the boat in this respect. It's reasonably quick to switch on and to focus, but we had to wait three seconds between shots, even in continuous mode. Browsing photos is slow, too, although we like the Micro Thumbnail mode's ability to display 100 shots at a time to help you find a particular one quickly.

Our image quality tests revealed that the Z100fd is capable of taking attractive photos, but as often as not, the two sub-£100 cameras on test this month produced better results. Colours were excellent in bright light but detail was a little vague. The automatic mode leapt to unnecessarily high ISO speeds in overcast lighting conditions, leading to increased noise levels and reduced detail. Noise-reduction processing gave a strange lattice texture and still failed to suppress blotches of colour.

The striking design and impressive specifications are tempting at this price but our tests revealed more problems than assets. Sony's T100 (What's New, Shopper 235) is a much better example of the same basic concept, although at a higher price.