Photos: Hands-on with the Fujifilm FinePix S1000fd
The Fujifilm FinePix S1000fd is a 10-megapixel superzoom with a 12x lens, which is handy because sometimes there are things we need to look at that are far away, and we hate walking
Sometimes things are too far away to see properly. Crave says "Fie!" to the maxim that the photographer's best zoom is his or her legs. Why walk when you can get a gadget to do the job for you? That's the sort of thinking we'd expect from those hippies over at SmartPlanet, which is why they have beautifully defined calf muscles and we have Domino's Pizza bookmarked. We prefer the Fujifilm FinePix S1000fd. It's a superzoom digital camera, with a 12x optical zoom lens.
It's pretty small for a superzoom, but the 1/2.3-inch CCD sensor, with its 10 megapixels, must be packed in pretty densely because it's quite weighty. Actually that'll be the four AA batteries.
The face-detection system can find up to six faces at a time. It will then stay locked on to track that face around the frame. Face detection is also used to spot eyes and correct red-eye from every face in the frame, if necessary.
The S1000fd is consumer-friendly in that it takes both xD cards and the more commonly used SD cards. The AA batteries also make it easy to buy more if you run out of juice even on holiday, where they talk funny and have the wrong type of plugs.
As well as seeing things far away, a super macro mode allows you to capture an image as close as 2cm. Video is available at VGA resolution, while panorama mode stitches together three images at three megapixels to create a wide shot.
The Fujifilm FinePix S1000fd is available now for £179. Click through to take a closer look. -Rich Trenholm
The lens has an equivalent focal length to 33-396mm on a 35mm camera. That's reasonably wide, as well as the 12x long zoom.
The screen is a large 69mm (2.7-inch) Amorphous Silicon TFT colour LCD monitor, which sounds quite cool. The viewfinder is a slightly less exciting-sounding 230,000-dot FLCD monitor with roughly 97 per cent coverage.
Scene modes include portrait, landscape, sport, night, fireworks, sunset, snow, beach, museum, party and flower. The mode wheel gives access to aperture and shutter priority, as well as full manual mode and two customisable user-defined modes.