A Brilliant First Camera (Fujifilm Finepix 1300)

Member Name: gtrhydim

Product:	Fujifilm Finepix 1300
Date:	01/01/02 (185 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Easy to use, robust, good looking

Disadvantages: Software hard to install

The first thing I have to say is that this was my first ever digital camera and I have no regrets. When I first saw it nearly a year ago in a high street shop it met all my needs, but a bit over my budget. So I got online and with a bit hunting I found it at about £30 of the high street price, and it was defiantly one of the best value cameras on the market.

The camera comes with an easy to navigate interface, very common to all Fuji cameras, which with a bit of prepping you are ready to master. It has four different picture qualities, 640 pixels and 1.3 Mega pixels, at 640 pixels you can take about 100 shots with the 8MB memory card provided and are more than enough for posting on the web or viewing on your home PC. If you are planning on using this camera to take photos solely to be posted on the web then remember that however high the resolution of the photo the browsers can only show 72dpi (sorry I am not sure how many pixels that is.) The higher resolution at 1300 pixels is more for if you are planning to print off your photos, but if your are going to need this resolution then you will want to get a larger memory card. I upgraded to a 64MB card, which can hold about a hundred high-resolution shots, you can pick one of these cards up of the Internet for around £30. But if you stick with the 8MB card provided you can only get around 12 high-resolution photos.

The camera is great for just point and click, but you can also be more adventurous. You can chose whether you want the camera to work everything out automatically, or be a little adventurous and play around with different flashes or get down to changing the white balance. The camera can be programmed to give you red eye reduction and a few other different flashes; it also has a timer and continuous shot mode. Then as I said before you can edit the white balance and the EV levels, although after ten months of having the camera I am not exactly sure what either of these does. But however ba
dly you might muck it up you can always easily return back to its original settings. After you have taken your shot with the twist of a dial you can view any shots you have taken and lose any you do not like.

When you come to transferring you photos to your PC all you need to provide is a USB port on your computer, the camera comes with drivers for getting your photos as well as a couple of programs to edit and organise them. The driver is reasonably easy to install, but if you are not to good on computers you may want to get a friend to help you. The programs that it comes with include the camera driver, Exif Viewer and DP Editor, all of those work on Mac and Windows, but the following only work on Windows, Adobe ActiveShare for organising your photos, Adobe PhotoDeluxe a very watered down version of Adobe PhotoShop and Exif Launcher. Although the driver is not too difficult to install, when installing all the other software I had to go searching through various subfolders on the CD to find the installation programs, which can become extremely frustrating.

As with all digital cameras it will consume your batteries very quickly, so it is a definite must to get some rechargeable batteries. If you are not going to get rechargeable batteries then you must defiantly get an AC adaptor, and plug it in when ever you are transferring photos to your computer because this is when your camera will drain the batteries the most.

So as you have probably realised from reading the review this is a great camera, which is perfect as a first time digital camera. And when I come round to buying a replacement I have no doubts it will be a Fuji.

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