Product Reviews

FujiFilm's V10 is a stylish camera with some fun features including a 3" 230,000-pixel screen. This takes up almost the entire back of the camera, leaving just enough room for a strip of buttons. This makes them fiddly to use, but not disastrously so.

There are four games to keep you occupied when there's nothing to photograph. However, they'll quickly drain the battery, which lasted for just 205 shots in our test. You can shoot quickly thanks to the two-second startup and fast autofocus. Just over a second between shots is among the best we've seen at this price. Browsing captured pictures

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is slow, though.

Our image tests revealed excellent colour accuracy, particularly in tricky conditions. The automatic white balance was unfazed by artificial lighting and the results were better in Auto mode than with the Incandescent white balance preset. The flash performed well, especially when illuminating large scenes, and the high ISO capability (up to 1,600) produced bright, blur-free images in low light. One of the scene presets shoots with and without flash in quick succession, allowing you to choose the best one later, which is a fantastic idea.

Image detail was less impressive. This was partly because of the relatively low resolution; five megapixels is poor at this price. Images looked very sharp, but more as a result of image processing than exceptional optics. The most serious problem was aggressive noise reduction, which gave an artificial sheen to photos and still let very noisy pixels through unaffected, resulting in unsightly textured patterns. This was particularly visible at ISO settings of 400 and above, but even brightly lit scenes at ISO 100 showed signs of the same problem.

Sadly, this spoils an otherwise excellent, well-priced camera.