| Product: |
Fujifilm Finepix F20 |
| Date: |
28.02.08 (34 review reads) |
| Rating: |
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Advantages: Good size, very easy to use, large screen, good quality photos produced
Disadvantages: zoom can pixelate some of the photos
After becoming in desperate need for a new camera for college work, and those remember able moments (after the previous one become very outdated and was dropped many times), we came across this camera: the Finepix F20.
Managing to purchase it for a reduced price of £100, offering a spec it does, it was hard to find any other. It uses 3x zoom, featuring a 6.1-megapixel 'SuperCCD HR Sensor', 2000 ISO max sensitivity, and 300 shots per full battery charge; to some people these details will mean nothing (with me being one of them), and so I will therefore try and review this product to the best of my knowledge.
The dimensions of the camera are very considerable (width: 9.4cm, depth: 2.8cm, height: 5.6cm), and also the weight is good too (150g) , not too heavy making it easy to make them quick shots on the move, but not to light making it harder to drop. The one feature of this camera that most attracted me to it was the 2.5 inch LCD display which covers much of one side, displaying photos very clearly. This was one thing that our previous camera lacked, as the screen was very small, and of low quality, therefore making it hard to distinguish how good the photo I had just taken was.
The camera uses 10mb of integrated memory, allowing XD flash memory picture cards to be entered (to the best of my knowledge there is no limit on the card size).
The battery also appears to be as good as its specification suggests as well. I have owned it nearly a year now and charged it no more than 4 times, and this has been with some quite heavy usage.
Starting up the camera allows you immediately to take photographs. There are various settings available to alter from this screen; firstly by clicking the 'F' button, you can change such things as the quality (6m, 3m, 2m, 0.3m), with the less quality you choose, the more you can store on the card. This is most useful on holidays when the amount of storage left on the card is very little, and so I could lower the quality to enable me to take more photos. You can also alter the colour from standard to chrome, or black and white.
Pressing the menu button also provides extra functions; shooting mode allows you to change the settings for the type of photograph you about too make (Auto, Natural light, Portrait, Landscape, Sport, night, fireworks, sunset, snow, beach, museum, party, flower, text, and anti-blur); I have only experimented with a few of these modes as I tend to just leave it on auto all the time (much less complicated). By clicking the menu button, you can also turn high speed shooting on and off, and turn on continuous shooting - 'Long Period', 'Final 3', 'Top 3', and 'off'. Camera settings are also accessed through this menu (such as date and time, shutter volume, LCD brightness etc.). Extra buttons on the camera allow zooming in and out (which is useful, although tends to make the photos look blurred), an anti-blur button (very useful when trying to focus and objects very close up), a macro shot button (making objects close up crystal clear, and the background blurred), a self-timer (so far never been of any use), and the flash button; this can be set to forced flash, suppressed flash (none), auto, and red-eye reduction.
Making a video can be done by sliding the button across on the top, allowing very clear movies to be made, although they tend to use up a lot of memory if the clips are very long.
Viewing pictures on the screen is done very well with the large screen. Each photo taken displays all details, such as the time and date taken, and the quality. Moving through the pictures is done simple by clicking left or right, deleting the photo by clicking up. You can also click the back button to display all the photos taken in thumbnails.
Transferring the photos and/or videos to your computer is also very easy using the supplied cables, or by using a card reader; the use of a card reader, however, doesn't transfer the photos stored on the camera's internal storage. The photos themselves, once transferred onto the PC, are of very high quality, with the sharpness of the macro images the most obvious; photos taken with the camera zoom are usually more pixelated, and so I tend to limit how often I used it, zooming into the photos using PC software instead.
After reading this review, you may be thinking this camera sounds difficult to user, although it really isn't. I would seriously recommend this camera to the beginner (for the ease of use), and also the more experiences user (for its amount of features), combining a very good balance between the specification and the price.
Thanks for reading.
Summary: an affordable camera for a good specification
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