Fujifilm FinePix Z100fd review

Get to grips with Fujifilm's compact camera

These days, camera specification sheets are rather like movie trailers, they whet the viewer’s interest and lead you to believe you’re going to be getting a blockbuster of a hit.

Fuji’s Z100FD certainly looked like a winner on first examination. Looking at the tiny body, its and impressive feat to shoe-horn a 5x optical zoom in here. They’ve found room for the periscopic lens array by placing the lens at the very top left hand corner of the body as you grip it. The one downside of this is that sticking your left-index finger in front or indeed on the lens is perilously easy and you really ought to get a free lens cloth with the Z100FD as you may spend a fair amount of time cleaning your fingerprints off the lens. The electronic heart of the beast is an 8MP chip that delivers 3264x2448pixel images, big enough to print up to 16x12 without any pixilation happening on the images.

The most noticeable thing about the camera from the outside is just how lovely it looks… the smart design and choice of colourstyles is complemented by the swanky illuminated Z that flashes to life when the camera’s combined on/off switch and lens cap is moved diagonally downwards to reveal the lens and flash.

Other tiny flaps hidden about the camera’s body reveal the AV and USB sockets and the Lithium Ion cell and the incredibly clever memory card slot.

It’s clever because it allows you to use any of the following types of card: xD, SD or SDHC. This is an engineering marvel that signals that Fuji’s finally waved the white flag as far as xD is concerned. Slightly less marvellous is the fact that as loaded xD cards flot halfway down the depth of the card slot, there were well over a dozen occasions where the contacts were not quite pressed firmly against one another and the camera showed a card error. If all this card palaver becomes too much, there’s also a respectable 54Mb of internal memory for when you are without any card at all.

Firmly in the “oh, go on, stick it in” section of the specification of the Z100FD are the auction and blog modes, which automatically process images to the ‘correct’ size for image display for these respective internet applications.

Less gimmicky by far, and also one of the most entertaining functions of the camera is referenced by the camera’s FD suffix. The automatic face detection triangulates the position of the eyes and mouth on face, and not surprisingly the simple expedient of placing one’s hands over one’s eyes causes the system to literally lose focus.

However when your subjects are not monkeying about hiding their facial features the camera not only slaps a green square over their face to show where it has cleverly found the face, it then looks closely at the eyes and decides whether there is any redeye, and automatically clears it up for you.

Given that the target market for this model is young people who could cheerfully describe themselves as nocturnal and spend lots of their time taking pictures of each other in nightclubs, I suspect this, along with the twin Image Stabilisation function, will be those functions most often called into action on the Z100FD.

Well so far so good. The camera is perfectly designed for its market, has appropriate features for them, looks lovely and is in fact pretty easy to use as well, particularly if you let the camera take the strain as far as dealing with dodgy lighting is concerned.

And then we get to image quality. The downside of particularly the non-CCD-Shift image stabilisation is that it makes the images very grainy, causes colours to lose a large amount of their subtlety, neutral background to become peppered with rogue coloured pixels and for image quality generally to take a tumble. This is a bit of a shame as the camera is doing exactly what it is designed to do, it just cannot change the laws of physics, nor completely remove shake without introducing other problems of its own.

It’s certainly true that a blocky picture is better than no picture at all, but you can’t help but wonder why they stuck an 8MP chip in here, rather than the 5MP chip of, say, the late lamented Finepix F30D, which was wonderfully adept at dealing with low light and showed fewer problems because it created fewer of them.

Good as the Z100FD may be at lots of things, the creation of flaw-free photographs is sadly not one of them. Appropriately enough, this camera looks like an elegantly fashioned piece of jewellery but from a performance point of view it is more bling than zing, and as clever as it is in very many ways, it cannot escape the digital camera’s first fundamental law: good pictures generally require good levels of light.  It is of course entirely possible that the people at whom this model is aimed will neither know any better image quality is possible, nor frankly care that much, having come from a mobile phone photography background. Still it’s a little bit of a shame that the camera cannot quite scale the heights first promised by its specification sheet.