Photos: Hands-on with the Fujifilm FinePix F60fd

The Fujifilm FinePix F60fd hit Crave hard this week, all 12 megapixels of it. That's pretty high for a compact camera. Resolution this enormous may be the figure used by the marketing chaps to convince you which camera is the bestest, but without a decent-sized sensor to support all those little light-collecting pixels there'll be ugly noise all over the shop, and nobody wants that.

Fortunately, the F60fd boasts a 1/1.6-inch Super CCD VII HR sensor, which is slightly bigger than most. Besides which, Fuji is noted for addressing the noise issue by improving the way its cameras deal with noise -- the F60fd succeeds the popular F50fd, itself the successor to the excellent F40fd and F30, all cameras known for their low-light performance.

As well as automatic scene recognition you get aperture and shutter priority. There are ten aperture settings and the option to set the shutter speed from 1 second to 1/1000 second. An 8-second-long shutter mode is also available.

We're not sure what's going on with the F button, which really should give access to common shooting functions. For some reason the first option in the menu is the power-management option, which adjusts the power levels of the LCD screen. This isn't really something we need at one-touch availability, especially while useful functions such as the white balance and continuous modes languish under the menu button.

There are loads of burst modes, all the usual scene modes, and also face detection 3.0. Fujifilm is already way ahead of other manufacturers in terms of face chasing, with glasses and profiles presenting no significant problems.

The Fujifilm FinePix F60fd is available now for around £170. An in-depth review is coming your way fast, but in the meantime click through the links for a closer look at the F60's best bits. -Rich Trenholm

The screen is an enormous 76mm (3-inch) LCD, which dominates the back of the camera but doesn't make the button layout feel cramped.

Crave loves the F60's chunky, industrial styling. Just look at that wrist-strap lug. That lug means business. The matte-black finish and graphite trim give the camera a special-ops feel. If ninjas took holiday snaps, this is what they'd use. Although a ninja's holiday snaps would just be a picture of a deserted beach, because ninjas never let themselves be seen.