Product Reviews

The Z5fd from Fuji is a 6.3 megapixel compact camera that has minimalist styling, but still manages to pack in a 3x optical zoom lens. The lens is entirely internal, using a clever mixture of mirrors to produce the zoom, which means the body of the camera retains its thin profile whether it's on or off. The lens covers a 35mm equivalent of 36mm to 108mm - not an inconsiderable amount when you consider the tiny dimensions of the Fuji.

In a nod to the iPod nano, the Z5fd is available in a range of colours, although the mocha-brown shade might not to be everyone's taste. The other colours available are raspberry red, pink and the more standard silver.

Aside from the colour choices, the Fuji is a well-designed device. The front of the camera and lens are protected by a sliding cover that doubles as the power switch, and there's a really impressive 2.5in LCD for composing shots and a healthy number of automatic shooting modes. With a 1600 ISO rating, it's also well suited to indoor use without a flash.

The Z5fd uses the xD type picture-card format for storage and has an internal memory of 26MB. As well as stills, it can also

Start-up times are impressively fast, taking no more than a couple of seconds from powering up to the first shot being taken. The screen is very bright, with accurate colour reproduction and detail. If you're an absolute beginner, the menu system might not be as easy to pick up as some others, but anyone with a passing knowledge of digital cameras should get going in no time.

In common with most of this season's compacts, the Z5fd incorporates a face-recognition technology that pinpoints the face of a person in a picture to give that area the best exposure and focus. It works very well, and if you're forever getting portrait shots where everything but the subject is sharp, this is certainly useful.

Overall results from the Z5fd were a bit soft for our liking and there was a little too much noise when compared with shots from other manufacturers' cameras. Colour accuracy, however, was superb. The Fuji captured deep and vibrant shades with impeccable precision. Skin tones were also very good, with a warm, natural tone even when the flash fired.

Even though the Fuji Z5fd is a small camera, it's surprisingly heavy and certainly won't fit comfortably in a shirt pocket, but it's well constructed, stylish and feels really robust. Colour accuracy and exposure are very good and the flash isn't so overpowering that it bleaches all the detail out of a shot. In fact, the camera's only real weak point is its lack of sharpness. All in all, a good buy.