Fujifilm FinePix F80EXR: Choose your own adventure

It's nice to have a choice. Myriad television channels mean there's always something to watch, even when Big Brother, Strictly Come Boring and Britain's Got Morons are on. You can choose from 15 different phone shops on the high street to buy your iPhone, and if you want to look exactly the same as every other cool kid on the dancefloor you can get skinny jeans in every colour there is. To top it all off, the Fujifilm FinePix F80EXR even offers you a choice of what you want your camera's sensor to be doing.

The F80EXR includes a 12-megapixel Super CCD EXR 1/2-inch sensor, which can be switched to different priorities depending on the scene. When light is good, the sensor can be switched to high-resolution mode for precise detail. When light is high in contrast between light and dark areas, the sensor can be switched to wide dynamic range mode to preserve detail in both highlight and shadows. And when it's dark, the sensor gears up for high sensitivity while keeping gritty image noise down.

The F80 also boasts a giant 10x optical zoom, with a 27mm wide angle, equivalent to a 35mm camera. Optical image stabilisation keeps things on an even keel.

The F80 shoots high-definition 720p video and can manage 4.2 frames per second in stills burst mode, but only at 3-megapixel resolution.

It spots faces and adjusts settings accordingly, but we're not impressed by that. Face detection is now old hat: like the Pentax I-10 launched last week, the F80 busts out pet detection. Yes, it will spot your pet's face and make sure it's in focus. We presume this works better on dogs, cats and the like rather than manta rays, komodo dragons and other more exotic animals. We'll test it out in the CNET UK menagerie.

The F80 is set to be pretty tasty if the previous EXR models are anything to go by: the F200 and F70 are among the highest-rated compacts in our reviews section.