Fujifilm FinePix HS10: Ta-dah! 30x zoom makes people disappear

We've known for a while that some technology is just magic. Usually, however, it's tech that seems impossibly small for what it does, or does something so fiendishly clever we just can't wrap our heads around how it works. But it's rare that a gadget pulls off anything so old-school as an actual magic trick. Abra-cadabra piff-paff-poof, then, with the Fujifilm FinePix HS10: a superzoom camera that actually makes people... disappear!

The HS10 packs a giant 30x optical zoom, with a focal length of 24-720mm equivalent to a 35mm camera. It's almost, but not quite, the first 30x optical zoom on the market: Olympus has also outed a 30x model, the SP-800UZ, ahead of the PMA show.

It features all the top-end bells and whistles you'd expect: raw shooting, an electronic viewfinder that knows when you're looking in it, and sensor-shifting image stabilisation, as well as the usual digital stabilisation and high ISO jiggery-pokery. It even borrows low-light cleverness from Fuji's EXR cameras, automatically combining multiple snaps at different settings to come up with one, optimised final shot. Clever, but not magic.

Video is of the high-definition variety, in glorious 1080p and stereo sound. A slo-mo mode captures 1,000 frames per second, or there's a 10fps full-resolution burst mode for stills. Motion panorama setting lets you sweep the camera in one motion and end up with multiple pictures neatly stitched into a panorama shot. If that's not magic, what is?

This is: when we get our hands on the HS10 for a full review, the first thing we're going to test is the intriguing motion remover mode. This also takes multiple snaps and combines them, but instead loses anything that's different about each snap, like people moving through the frame. The obvious application is excising wandering tourists from holiday snaps of famous landmarks. Magic.

Click 'Continue' through our gallery of official pictures as we pull pricing and availability out of a hat.