Fantastic Classy Camera Which Takes Amazing Pictures (Fujifilm Finepix S8000fd)

Member Name: DixieChick101

Product:	Fujifilm Finepix S8000fd
Date:	19/04/09 (143 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Fantatic Picture quality, fantastic camera .

Disadvantages: Shutter Lag, Load Up Time, Reliability is unknown, seems flimsy in some places .

For years I've always wanted an SLR, I do love taking pictures, however I have never gone to enough places to take gorgeous pictures before, so have always put off against buying it. However as some of you know, I'm going to University in September to study media production, which includes photography, and I realised that if I really wanted to do good within that particular module, maybe my little Kodak wouldn't be good enough, so I popped on down to my nearest Curry's. Other reasons for buying another camera was the fact that my nan has just got into photography and after borrowing my camera for a few weeks I could tell she was enthralled.

Please remember this review is going to be based at the everyday person who wants to buy a camera, I'm not doing photography properly yet, so all of the big terms are foreign to me at the moment, so be prepared for an un-techy review.

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Buying the Camera
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I went into buy the camera with a specification sheet I found on the net for an SLR camera. I knew that this SLR camera that I had the specifications for was way out of my price range, but I wanted to find a good enough camera, which was like and SLR that would do pretty much the same job, but would be within my price range.

The camera I ended up buying was called the Fujifilm S800fd, it is known as a bridge type camera and it allows you take brilliant quality photos which can be confused for professional photographs. I was told that this was probably the closest I was going to get to a DSLR, than actually paying the price for one of those, and I think I have brought something pretty good here.

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The Specifications
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Pixels: 8.3million pixels
Lens: 18x Optical Zoom Lens
Shutter Speed: 4 sec to 1/2000
Viewfinder: 0.24 inch
LCD Monitor: 2.5 inch
Power Source: 4x AA batteries
Weight: 510g

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The Fun Stuff
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The best stuff about the camera.

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What's In the Box
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In the box you will receive the following:

4 x AA Alkaline Batteries- These are pretty basic, but mine have lasted for two weeks now.

Shoulder Strap- Almost impossible to attach, took me a good 20 minutes or so.

Lens Cap and Cord- If you use the cord then if you turn the camera on with the lens cap still on, the cap gets pushed off but is still attached to the camera.

USB cable- A necessity with digital cameras now a days.

A/V Cable

CD Rom

FinePix Viewer

Owner's Manuel

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Weight & Size
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The specifications say that this little man is 510 grams, which to some people will mean nothing. It's not a light thing I can tell you that, but I think when it comes to good quality cameras like this, you want to remember that you've got it in your hands and you have to think how much they have actually crammed into something the size of your entire palm. This is quite light compared to some cameras I have held in my lifetime, but if you're using the strap and carrying it around your neck, then you might have to be careful as it might pull on your neck a little bit. I haven't used the neck strap for a long period yet, however I can tell it might hurt a little bit if used for long periods.

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Style
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Okay, it's not as 'pretty' or stylish as my previous Kodak camera or my JVC camcorder; however it looks pretty nice in my opinion. I had a small range of cameras like this one to choose from and this one was probably the most expensive, however it looked the most stylish and the least like a brick which some of the others did look like.

The lens when closed is probably about the size of the base of a coke can, when you use the zoom or even just turn the camera in, the lens pops out and becomes smaller and smaller as it zooms into what you want to take a picture of. Is it easy to hold the camera I hear you ask? Yes, there is a portion of the camera which you hold with your right hand, it allows you to snugly grip the camera, without touching the lens, and at the same time it allows you to touch all of the buttons with your thumb or to adjust the zoom with your index finger, whilst at the same time still holding the camera securely.

The LCD screen is smaller than the one on my Kodak camera which cost me under a £100 for the actual camera. This isn't a problem however; you still get to see the pictures you're taking brilliantly well. The viewfinder at the top is the size of my thumb nail, not very big at all, and when playing around with it, I really struggled to look through it without feeling dizzy almost.

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Buttons
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There are not too many buttons on this camera at all, the shutter button is in the centre of a circle thing which is the device which allows you to zoom in and out. The shutter button is pretty easy to press. The power button confused me slightly at the start. With EVERY camera I have had, you press a button in to turn on the camera, however with this camera you have a slide button which you pull to the right and then the camera turns on. Carrying on with the top of the camera you have two buttons with pictures on them, the first one you come to is the face detection and then the anti blur button.

The little device in the middle is pretty much the same on all cameras I have used, it allows you to turn this little device until you get the scene you want, and for example you can choose auto and manual and many more.

On the left hand side of the camera is one button sitting on his lonesome; this button has a little lightning bolt which is widely used for flash on the cameras. Make sure you are not holding the top of the camera when you do this as the push of this button pops up this little flash thing which makes it look even more professional.

The buttons on the back of the camera all help you make sure that you get the best possible pictures, the first one you come to is the EVF/LCD monitor selector, this button allows you to change between looking through the view finder to looking at your picture through the LCD monitor screen. I have to say, I have attempted to look through the viewfinder and have no idea why someone chooses that over the LCD monitor, I'm sure there is a good reason, I myself can't understand why.

On the back you also get the Playback button which allows you to view the pictures you have taken, the F to the right of that is called the Photo Mode button, this buttons allows you to control the file quality setting, the ISO speed and the colour settings. The latter one allows you to change the colour to chrome or black and white, I myself have always taken pictures with the normal setting and then allowed the software I have at home to turn the picture into black and white if I wanted to. I do adore black and white pictures and I think that it is best to take the picture with the normal setting though.

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Target Audience
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I'll probably talk more about this at the end but at the moment I have to say I have found the camera incredibly easy to use, however if you are not a huge fan of taking pictures then I would recommend for going for something more basic, this camera is quite a bit of money, and it is a lot heavier to carry around compared to my other model that I have. If you like me, want a good camera which is not breaking the bank as much as a DSLR would, but a camera that still gives you the same quality then this camera is for you. I am very pleased with it so far.

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The Camera's Features
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When I went into buy the camera, I took in a print out sheet of another camera that had all of the things on it, I have to say I was cheated a little as the sales person told a few white lies however, they have not done me too much harm so I'm not going to bother to complain. The features of this camera are extensive, here is what the camera provides:

Macro: The macro is a mode which allows you to take close up shots. The only time I would really use this is if I was taking pictures for EBay or something like that, I'm more adapt at taking landscape shots or messing around taking pictures of my mates or something.

Flash: Considering that I have enjoyed photography for a number of years, I have never really understood the need for flash. It says that it's useful for taking pictures at night or indoor dark locations, the instruction booklet really goes into detail about this and allows you to learn when or how to use flash.

Intelligence Face Detection: This is a nice little extra on this camera, I'll go into how it works slightly, it works by triangulating the mouth, and eyes and using an algorithm to optomise focus, white balance, and exposure for up to ten faces in a single frame. Understand that? If you did good for you, I didn't, what it seems to do is make the faces stand out within the picture.

Dual IS mode: IS stands for Image Stabilisation and this little function allows you to stop the camera shake and ruining the picture.

White Balance: The white balance allows you to adjust the colour balance based on white to suit the colour of the ambient light around the subject. You can take a picture of a white piece of paper to suit the shooting conditions.

Shutter Speed: If you are using the high speed shooting then your batteries will run down more quickly. The shutter speed was something quite important to me and this is what I was lied about to, I asked if the camera had good shutter speed and he said it depended on the SD card you brought, so I asked for the best one they had to minimise shuttle lag, he said it wouldn't be noticeable now, but I have found the shutter lag to be the same on this as it is on my Kodak camera.

Self Timer: This allows you to set your camera to a 2 second delay or a 10 second delay, we used this with my previous camera to get a picture of the whole family. A good little addition.

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Photography Functions
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Different Photography Functions

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Shooting Mode
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By using the mode dial you are able to choose what type of shooting you want to do, the main one is of course AUTO, which allows crisp and clear pictures for ordinary photography. The next one is picture stabilisation, this mode allows for a fast shutter speed that reduces camera shake and moving subject bluring. The next one is the Natural Light mode, this mode produces images which retain the nautral ambience when shots are taken in low light conditions. If you are unsure of what to choose, then the next mode is the Natural & Flash mode, this mode takes two pictures, a natural picture and a flash picture. This stops you missing a shot because you chose the wrong mode.

The next shooting modes are the SP1 and SP2 scene position. This allows you to choose between 13 types of scene. You can choose through the types of scenes you want and you get a lovely picture of the type of thing you can take and a description of what you want to take. Some of the best scene positions are the following:

Portrait
Landscape
Sport
Night
Fireworks
Sunset
Snow
Beach

These ones I've seen on my previous camera, however on this camera you get a few extra things, firstly you can choose Museum which allows you to take a picture in a museum, making it quiet and everything like that. My favourite mode is the auction mode, like I said earlier I use the macro to take auction pictures for EBay and have only just found this little addition, it allows you to take as many pictures as you want (up to four) and it'll put them in the same image. I can spend quite a lot of time doing this on Powerpoint but now this camera does it for me, I couldn't be happier.

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Playback
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In playback the camera allows you to do a lot of things that you'll find yourself doing on a computer on the actual camera itself. You can rotate the images every which way that you want by a push of a few buttons, you can also protect the images or copy the images from internal memory to the memory card. Something I haven't used yet is the voice memo section, this allows you to record over the picture, I'm sure I'll use this when I go on holiday in the summer, I'll be taking a lot of pictures and to be able to talk into the camera like a Dictaphone over a particular image will allow me to remember where I was on that day and what the picture is of. You can also trip the images, or crop them on the actual camera itself, I'm sure this will help a lot.

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Recording Movies
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For our holiday in the summer, we are in the process of discussing whether to take the camcorder along with this still camera on holiday with us, this still camera does allow you to record movies, but I have yet to use this in a proper situation. It works pretty much the same way that it would with a video camera, so if you have used one of those before then you will be fine with this.

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Final Opinion
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The camera has not been in my possession for a long time, I brought it at the start of the easter holidays and now it's coming up to the end, so it was a bit of a question if I was going to review the camera or not. I was talking to a few friends of mine who are also on the site about waiting until I've used the camera in better settings but I have used this camera none stop during the holidays and have got quite a good feel of the camera so far.

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Price
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For the camera I was expecting to pay about £250 at most for everything, I went into Currys on the outskirts of where I live, and found this camera sitting there and fell in love. The camera was £149 which in my opinion was a fantastic price, however of course you have to think about all of the extra things that you have to buy with a camera of this kind.

When it came to paying for the camera I managed to get the price up to about £220, with the camera bag, which I'm now thinking of selling because of personal reasons (I hate the feel of it), the battery charger that I brought, the apparently brilliant SD card which stops shutter lag, and then the warranty on the camera, it was well within my price range and I got everything that I wanted.

If you are looking for a camera, then this might be out of some people's price range for the amount of pictures they might take. If you are not going to take many photos then please shop around for another camera, you can get decent cameras now for under £100. This camera is top of the range for its type and you are paying for it.

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Ease Of Use
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I have been using this camera none stop for the past few weeks and every day I learn something new about the camera, this means that it's not as easy as I would like. Yes it's nice to find something new about the camera, but it takes a lot of searching to find this little additions and I myself prefer simplicity to finding things weeks later.

If we are talking about taking pictures however though, it is one of the best cameras I have used in a long time. The weight of the camera makes it a lot more studier to hold and then the pixels and zoom on the camera are just fantastic and you do produce fantastic pictures.

The camera is pretty easy to pick up and point and shoot a picture, if you want to take a picture of something that is going on, like a bird in your garden or your child doing something funny, then picking up this camera and turning it on takes just under 5 seconds which is quite long in my opinion. One of the things I would have thought they would have sorted out is with a click of a button you are able to take pictures. This is a shame as I really wanted to get a picture of this car that went past the other day, okay, the guy driving the car, but by the time the camera was turned on, the car was gone and the lovely looking guy.

Without the instruction booklet you would in no certain terms, be screwed. I know I shouldn't use that language on a site like this however I have no other way of describing it, I'll talk more about the manuel in a minute but it seriously is a god send when it comes to this camera.

The camera would not really be good if you have never used a camera before, I'm sure you'd find it quite difficult to do things like playback your pictures, use the flash, and all of the little extras that this camera provides and expects you to use, however if you are a bit techy and know slightly how a camera works then you should be fine. In ease of use I would give it a 7/10, I think because of the fact that I am still finding things about it down the line and I didn't learn it all when I went through the instruction booklet the first time.

All in all it's a fantastic, simple ish camera that takes amazing pictures.

Rating: 7/10

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Instruction Booklet
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A god send I swear, when I brought my camcorder I found it very difficult to use because there was no instruction booklet or link to a website with an instruction booklet. When I posted the review of the camcorder a fantastic member gave me a link to the page which held the instruction manual and I have to say I HATE ELECTRONIC manuals. I couldn't afford to print out every page and put it together myself, and if I was going on holiday and needed to know how to do something, internet access is not always available. I have to say I was shocked that it didn't provide one on paper and I was expecting the same thing with this camera.

This camera however is provided with TWO instruction manuals. One is simply a piece of paper which tells you the basics, like uploading the computer, etc. The main booklet is 162 pages long, how many of these pages do you think is in English?

ALL OF THEM, I know I was shocked as well, I really expected to get about 5 pages in English, but the whole booklet is in English and describes everything in such detail that even the biggest technophobe could do what it tells you to do. This booklet is fantastic and has helped me out loads with the camera and the review.

Rating: 10/10 (Couldn't have been better)

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Charging/Batteries
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My biggest gripe about this camera is the fact that you have to use Alkaline Batteries, 4 of them to be precise. With my nans old camera, we had to use 2 x batteries and we had so much damn trouble with it, I nearly considered not buying this camera because of this fact. I am much more used to Lithium batteries which you charge up on the camera, and I love these things. I did risk buying this camera, but made sure that I brought the best possible rechargeable batteries with it and best possible recharger and if I ever have any trouble I'm going back to the shop because I was promised that they'd work fine.

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Handling
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The camera is quite heavy but that is to be expected, it is so easy to hold this camera and with the shoulder strap you can hold it around your neck for extra support and then hold it with your right hand only. This is great and is so much easier than what I've used before.

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Upload
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It's so easy to upload to the computer it's ridiculous, you just plug in your USB to either end and then turn on the camera and you should be connected, it takes you a few seconds to see your pictures and you really do see the quality of the pictures more on your computer than you can ever dream of doing on the LCD screen.

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Zoom
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The zoom on this camera is just amazing, it doesn't blur easily as well, I really will be able to tell more about the zoom when I use it in better settings but for now, I'm amazed at the quality of it.

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Good Points
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Here is a list of the good things about the camera.

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Picture Quality
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You really will take amazing pictures with this camera, I am not a natural photographer but I have taken some stunning shots with this camera, I am unable to show these as the person does not want to be shown but it really allows you to do amazing things this camera does. I really think this is the best camera I have owned and I will get some amazing results out of it when I need to.

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No Red Eye
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The camera takes away red-eye without even asking you, the camera uses the face detection to take away the red eye from every frame. This is fantastic, so many times have I come out looking like a devil in pictures because of the dreaded red eye.

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Things To Do
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I'm constantly learning with this camera, today I have found out so much more about the camera than I didn't know before, I'm sure later down the line I'll learn a lot more as well. I sat for a good hour the other day playing around with this camera and learning the ins and outs.

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Negative Points
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Here is a list of the bad things about the camera.

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Shutter Lag
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I was told with the SD card that I brought which cost me more than I expected, and the fact that it's a great camera the shutter lag was supposed to be minimal. It's exactly the same on this camera as it was on my Kodak one which had the smallest possible memory card available. I haven't had too many problems with the shutter lag, however if it becomes too bad I will have to take the camera back, because I was promised a camera with barely any shutter lag and this one is excessive.

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LCD Screen Quality
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This is not really a negative but it's worth mentioning, the quality of the pictures you see on the LCD are not brilliant, with my Kodak camera what you saw is what you got, however the quality on the LCD screen is nothing compared to what you get when you upload it onto the computer. I will never delete an image based on quality with this camera now.

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Start Up
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1. Turn On Camera. 2. 3. 4. Lens pops out 5. The LCD screen comes to life, by the time that this has all been done I'm sure whatever I want to film would have disappeared by this time. Again I was told a little white lie as the guy said the load up time was good and it really is quite poor in my opinion.

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Reliability
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Nothing has gone wrong yet, touch wood, but things like the mode dial and the flash bulb feel quite flimsy, and knowing how bloody clumsy I am, I have a distinct feeling that something is going to break from the camera pretty easily. I have good cover over the camera, but again, knowing my luck, it'll go when something important is happening.

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Smudge
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The LCD screen and the lens is already smudged to death, it's kept in a good camera bag, but it is still smudged. I wouldn't have expected this to happen so quick and I'm constantly having to clean them.

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Overall Opinion
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Overall this is a fantastic camera; I couldn't have expected something better for the price I paid. It wasn't the camera that was expensive it was all of the little additions that I thought I'd need to get the best out of my camera. Yes some of them were a slight waste of money, however I think the camera was worth every penny.

I don't think it is aimed at people who don't know how to use a camera however if you are looking for a DSLR type camera, but don't want to pay all the money in the world then this is the camera that you should try this one. It looks like a DSLR, it acts like one and takes pictures of the same quality, it just doesn't have the price tag or the brilliant shutter. I think this camera is worth every penny and if you get a chance or need a new camera then please check out this one.

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Overall Ratings
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Ease of Use: 7/10
Instruction Manual: 10/10
Weight: 8/10
Styleability: 8/10
Shutter Lag: 4/10
Zoom: 10/10
Picture Quality: 10/10
Anti Blur: 8/10

(C) Kirsty 2009

Summary: See review

Processing/Quality:
Reliability:
Ease of use:
Features:
Picture quality: