Product Reviews

It's not a digital SLR, but neither is it a compact. This is one confused camera, that we love and loathe in almost equal measure. Start with the lens: we love it. It equates to 28-300mm lens on a 35mm camera, and for that alone you could pay upwards of £300 on a DSLR. It's also bright, managing a pretty impressive f4.9 at the longest zoom. But then we loathe the viewfinder, which isn't a proper through-the-lens optic, but rather a small, very grainy screen set inside the eyepiece. First time you use it, you feel you've been cheated.

We love the manual focus, which uses a proper focus ring rather than fiddly buttons, and we're pleased to see a 58mm thread on the front of the lens barrel, which opens up a whole world of filters to the more ambitious user. But, and there's always a but, why would a more ambitious user choose this over something like a Canon EOS 400D? Our guess would be the price. We've seen it on sale online for as little as £198. So, bear that in mind as we take you through the rest of its features.

The matt black body is sturdy and well balanced, helped in part by a chunky handgrip that is home to four AA batteries. The

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resolution tops out at 6.3mp, which is perfect for 7 x 5in prints on an inkjet, and good enough for the occasional 10 x 8in. Around the back, there's a glorious 2.5in LCD, which refreshes smoothly and comes in particularly handy when you're using the manual focus, as the frame's centre is enlarged to aid fine adjustments. It's also home to a live histogram that'll show you how bright, dark, burnt or clipped your results will be as you pan around the scene.

It used xD memory, but there's nothing bundled beyond the 10MB internal circuitry, so without upping your budget to add one, you'll only be able to take three highest-quality shots between each download. Switch to Raw files and it's too little to store even one. Sadly, the Raw format it uses is also poorly-suited for Macs. Our Mac OS X 10.4.8 installation, which lends its Raw libraries to Aperture, was unable to read theFinepix images, as was Photoshop. Fortunately, Fujifilm bundles its own suite of applications, but these are unattractive, and no match for either of the aforementioned applications for Raw image processing.

We were impressed by the S6500's colour performance. Tones in our test shots were realistic and very well balanced; neither saturated nor washed out, even under tricky lighting conditions, such as office lighting.

However, we were concerned by the levels of compression applied at the 'normal' quality setting. This was alleviated somewhat by only using the finest setting, but while the results were certainly good for the price, they were not perfect.

All-in-all, then, this camera gets a qualified thumbs-up. It is feature-packed, and has a great lens, and we're happy to overlook some of its shortcomings as a reflection of the bargain-basement price.