Thumbs up (Fujifilm Finepix A201)

Member Name: dur_kid

Product:	Fujifilm Finepix A201
Date:	30/09/02 (682 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: good price, Good resolution, ease of use

Disadvantages: none

After borrowing a friend?s digital camera whilst he was on holiday, (very trusting of him I know) I totally fell in love with the digital concept, as it is both practical and as cheap as you want to make it. I needed to get a digital camera as I was doing a lot on one of the more famous auctions. As my friends camera (that also had sound video, do I detect a note of envy here) was really out of my price range, I decided to go and look in the local shop for something cheap (ish) and as cheerful as possible.

I looked at several options all of which were excellent for the money, I then discovered the Fugi A201, eureka! The two things that impressed me was that it was within my budget to a maximum of 180 pounds or so (it actually cost 169 pounds) and the pixel count was much higher than others in a similar price bracket. The pixel size goes anywhere from a few hundred to several million, the higher the better as this factor controls how well a pic "blows up" if it has a small pixel range the pic becomes "grainy" to the point of being unacceptable. The more you pay for a camera usually the higher the pixels, the Fugi has 2 million around a third to half as many as most other "budget" to midrange cameras. As an alternative you can get a famous Japanese camera whose name I won't mention and incidentally a make I have always sworn by is around 90 pounds secondhand but only has 1.2 million pixels. The resolution is second to none crisp clear pictures and as all digitals have a healthy appetite rechargeable batteries are a must.

You can get a charger and four nickel metal hydride batteries for around 12/14 pounds, and this makes life a lot easier as you would need a second mortgage to pay for ordinary batteries. Whilst downloading to your PC battery power is required quiet a lot in fact, to help remedy this you can optionally buy a mains lead, taking pics and downloading, the batteries would only last an hour or two.



The amount of photos you can shoot depends on the setting quality and the size of the smartcard (I got a 16 megabyte card with the camers to get you started). On the lowest setting you can take up to over a hundred pictures on the other hand if you go for the top end quality one can only get around twenty seven , intermediate level about forty seven or so ( this is the usual setting for good quality pictures) the higher the pixels the higher the size of the saved file eventually requiring a larger hard drive for storage.

The camera has three main settings: -
The Top range being 2 million pixels ? FINE NORMAL and BASE.
1 million pixels ? FINE and NORMAL
VGA - NORMAL
On the VGA mode and one million pixels the digital zoom works fine on all settings, including video, however on the Top range the digital zoom does not work it is not intended to obviously a minor point I feel as the settings for most things is middle range.

The amount of pics you can take is mainly due to the size of your "smart card" this is the storage device a bit like a hard drive in a PC this camera comes with a 16 mb card but you can opt to buy extras anytime you wish, I think to date the biggest is about 128 mb, with this size you could literally take hundreds of pictures. On the downside the casing is a pretty silver but does look a little "plastic" but are very durable, light and elegant. Not too many fancy things to get confused with, which I like, but enough options to allow the more creative of us to excell.

The USB connection works fine however as another opinion suggested it does have issues with Windows XP, there appears to be no support in XP, however the XP camera wizard automatically takes it on when you switch the camera on so solves the problem, however there seems to be no way to get shortcut icons on the desktop
or anywhere else for that matter.

There are five options of flash, white light adjustment, a 1.6 inch LCD screen (you can play at being a real director with this) USB cable download, and she weighs 145 grammes (not much heavier than a box of fags) and last but not least a 2.5 times digital zoom for good measure. The movie shoot is 20 seconds long is no real drawback as has been suggested because if you use the software provided correctly, to your advantage you can "string" as many as you like together, bu
t if you want sound you would have to pay for it like anything else and this would negate the "cheerful" side.Many years ago, when Fugi first came to this country (yes I am older than my handrighting suggests) I never really rated them and this was clearly a mistake on my part, with preconceived ideas I may have missed a lot.

All in all an excellent product and to be highly recommended.

Summary: