Fujifilm FinePix Z100fd cool 8-megapixel camera with enhanced features

It was only a few months ago that Fujifilm released its FinePix Z10fd digital camera, which was clearly intended to appeal to the young and style-conscious, with its exotic-sounding colour variations, smooth metal appearance and range of menu settings geared towards party, beach and fun living.

The Z100fd is essentially an enhancement of the Z10fd with a little more style, a little more weight and a few more features that should ensure that this becomes the cool accessory of choice. So the dimensions are marginally greater (92.0 x 55.7 x 19.8mm and weighing a comfortable 138g) and there are four new, funky shades to choose from (Shell Pink, Satin Silver, Cappuccino Brown and Tuxedo Black).

There's also a larger sliding cover on the front which moves diagonally from top right to bottom left: this turns the camera on while simultaneously lighting up the ‘Z' on the logo - everybody go “Ooooh!”

Or not.

The LCD display on the back has a reinforced glass coating to keep it scratch-free and has been expanded from 2.5-inch to 2.7-inch in size (there's no optical viewfinder), while the optical zoom lens has increased from 3x to 5x, placing it considerably ahead of its rivals.

The controls on the back are neat and uncluttered and the main menu dial now features one finger rotation as well as ‘arrow' selection, which makes scrolling through the sixteen scene modes a breeze. The scenes are the same as on the Z10fd, which means you can still shoot underwater (with a suitable case cover), on snow, at the beach and take snaps for eBay as well as the useful Natural Light With Flash mode, where two snaps are taken with and without flash for you to compare.

The other similarities with the earlier model are the ISO settings (64 - 1600), the Face Detection facility, which comes with automatic intelligent red-eye removal, and the Intelligent flash system that cleverly balances out how much power to use to achieve a natural looking foreground illumination and background exposure.

The 8-megapixel CCD array provides a significant improvement on the quality of images over the Z10fd's 7.2-megapixel, although there is still a problem with increased noise at any ISO setting over 800. This is partly due to the fact that the Z100fd is the first in the Z range to use CCD-shift image stabilisation to help cure blurring.

The 54MB internal memory is quite generous and the Z100fd is xD-Picture card, SD and SDHC compatible. There's not much in the way of in-camera editing, but the Blog mode survives and you can view up to 100 frames simultaneously in the LCD. Slide shows are a bit slow but the overall quality of the images, especially using the flash options, is considerably above average.(itreviews.co.uk)