Fujifilm FinePix Z200FD: Ghostly goings-on

You know, we're not so much bothered by the bad reviews of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. We'll look past the terrible title, Harrison Ford's doughy visage staring out at us from every bus -- even the fact that Shia LaBeouf's in it. What has us worried about Steven Spielberg still being in possession of the plot is his plans for a social network built around ghostly and extra-terrestrial experiences. But we've just had a spooky experience of our own here at Crave: we were planning to write about the Casio Z200, but we couldn't find the charger, and when investigating an alternative Crave, what popped up but an announcement of the almost identically named Fujifilm FinePix Z200fd! We-e-e-eird!

This isn't the first time we've noticed that the world is running out of unique names. But we all always like a good announcement, so we took a look at what the Z200fd -- Fuji's model -- can do. It's a 10-megapixel point-and-shoot, with a waistline of 20mm and a 69mm (2.7-inch screen). It includes face detection, intelligent red-eye removal and optical image stabilisation.

So what's new? It has a 5x Fujinon optical zoom lens, which is a step up from the usual. There's also two brand-new self-timer modes: couple timer and group timer. This detects faces and fires the shutter when the required number of faces are in shot. Couple timer also has different settings so you can choose how frosty or intimate you want the portrait to be. Whether it makes the internationally recognised hand-flapping gesture for 'move in a bit', or leaves that to you, remains to be seen.

The Fujifilm Z200FD comes in red, black, silver and pink. No word on price yet, but it should be around before the end of this month. As for Indy, we're hoping it's more vintage Spielberg than Yvette Fielding. -Rich Trenholm