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Fujifilm FinePix S8000fd review: Fujifilm FinePix S8000fd

If you don't want to carry around a huge dSLR and a gaggle of lenses, the Fujifilm FinePix S8000fd might be your solution. With its 18x optical zoom equivalent to 27mm, this camera covers a wide area. It's ideal for both portraits and landscapes and leaves behind the hassle of extra lenses

Philip Ryan
5 min read

One of the best reasons to consider a megazoom is the fact that you get a big zoom range in a small package, so you don't have to carry around huge dSLR lenses and, more importantly, you don't have to pay the huge prices for those dSLR lenses.

6.5

Fujifilm FinePix S8000fd

The Good

Long 18x optical zoom lens with 27mm-equivalent wide angle; sensor-shift image stabilisation.

The Bad

Mediocre image quality; no hotshoe; no raw capture.

The Bottom Line

Fujifilm's FinePix S8000fd 18x megazoom has a nice body design and offers a commendable level of control, but its mediocre image quality and sluggish performance blights what could otherwise be an excellent camera

For around £180, Fujifilm's FinePix S8000fd sports an 18x optical zoom lens that covers a 35mm-equivalent range of 27mm-to-486mm with a maximum aperture range of f/2.8-to-f/4.5. Given that a lot of megazooms start around a not-so-wide 36mm with their zooms, this camera's lens should make group portraits or big landscapes easier to frame.

Design
With its well-sculpted, rubberised grip and another nicely contoured and rubberised area for your thumb, the S8000fd is more comfortable to hold than some megazooms.

However, the F button, which leads you to the FinePix menu that lets you change ISO, image quality/size and colour mode settings, is located too close to where your thumb goes, and we accidentally pressed it a few times during our tests. Other than that, the buttons are placed well. The only button not on the right hand side of the camera is the flash button, which is logically placed on the left side of the flash itself.

Close scrutiny shows that the FinePix S8000fd has a lot in common with Olympus' SP-550 UZ. Both use 1/2.35-inch CCD sensors that are a touch smaller than the 1/2.5-inch sensor in Panasonic's 18x megazoom DMC-FZ18. Also, both have the same zoom range, since they have identically-spec'ed lenses, and both include sensor-shift image stabilisation.

Their bodies are very similar in layout, though the Olympus is a touch smaller and has a nice grip around the barrel of the lens, but its main grip isn't as nicely shaped as this Fuji's grip. The biggest difference between the two is that the SP-550 UZ is a 7.1-megapixel camera, while the S8000fd has an 8-megapixel CCD.

Features
The S8000fd includes most of the features you'd expect to find in a megazoom. The two biggest omissions are a hotshoe and raw capture. As mentioned above, the S8000fd includes sensor-shift image stabilisation in contrast to the DMC-FZ18's optical image stabilisation. While sensor-shift IS has a reputation of being inferior to optical IS, we got impressive results from the S8000fd.

In our tests, we were able to capture a sharp image shooting at 1/150th of a second and the lens zoomed all the way to its 486mm limit. Without image stabilisation, we would have had to shoot at 1/500th of a second to get those results. Fuji also includes an ISO-boost mode that they also refer to as an IS mode. However, as always, higher ISOs bring with them more noise and less sharpness.

As has become the trend, the S8000fd includes face detection, but this camera uses Fuji's original algorithms rather than the newer system incorporated into its little sister, the FinePix F50fd. Still, it does a good job of finding faces in your shots and tends to lose track of the faces if it can't find both eyes, while the newer version can find faces even if they are in profile. Once the camera finds the faces, it uses them to help determine focus and exposure so the camera won't make a mistake and focus on something in the background instead of your mum's lovely smile.

Control freaks will appreciate the S8000fd's manual exposure controls, which give you up to 10 choices for apertures spanning f/2.8 through f/8 and 40 shutter speeds ranging from 4 seconds to 1/2000 second. The interface for those controls could be better, though.

Rather than including any thumb or finger wheels, you have to press the exposure compensation button and then use the control pad to set aperture and/or shutter speed. One, or even better two, wheels would make the process a lot smoother of an experience. Still, it's nice to see manual exposure controls with this many choices, since some only include two or three choices for apertures.


Performance
While not as slow between shots as the Olympus SP-550 UZ, the S8000fd is far from a speed demon and can't even nearly keep up with the SP-550 UZ's burst rate. The camera took 3.1 seconds to start up and capture its first JPEG. Subsequent JPEGs took 2.6 seconds between shots with the flash turned off and 2.9 seconds with the flash turned on.

Shooting time (in seconds)
(Smaller bars indicate better performance )
Typical shot-to-shot time  
Time to first shot  
Shutter lag (dim)  
Shutter lag (typical)  
Canon PowerShot S5 IS
1.6 
1.3 
0.8 
0.5 
Sony Cyber-shot DSC-H9
1.4 
2.1 
1.3 
0.6 
Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ18
1.3 
1.8 
1.1 
0.7 
Fujifilm FinePix S8000fd
2.6 
3.1 
2 
0.8 
Olympus SP-550 UZ
4.6 
2.9 
1.6 
1 

Typical continuous-shooting speed (frames per second)
(Longer bars indicate better performance)
Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ18
3.4 
Sony Cyber-shot DSC-H9
2 
Canon PowerShot S5 IS
1.6 
Olympus SP-550 UZ
1.5 
Fujifilm FinePix S8000fd
0.5

Shutter lag proved slightly sluggish, measuring 0.8 seconds in our high contrast test and 2 seconds in our low contrast test, which mimic bright and dim shooting conditions, respectively. In our continuous shooting test, we were able to capture 8.1-megapixel images at a dismal average rate of 0.5 frames per second.


Image quality
Image quality could also have been better and ends up about on par with the Olympus. While colours look accurate and the camera's automatic white balance does a fine job of serving up neutral colours in all sorts of lighting conditions, images are not as sharp as we would have liked.

We saw very little coloured fringing and even then only under the most extreme circumstances. In some cases, the camera tended to underexpose a little when using the Average metering mode, which uses the entire scene to determine exposure.

Noise is not the S8000fd's strong suit. We saw some noise even at the camera's lowest ISO setting of ISO 64, though you probably won't notice noise in prints until you reach ISO 200. Even then, artefacts should be minimal, and Fuji's noise-reduction algorithms don't degrade sharpness appreciably until ISO 400. However, prints should still be very usable at that sensitivity.

By ISO 800, images lose a lot of their sharpness, along with a noticeable amount of shadow detail. ISO 1,600 images become heavily blurred and have a very granular look with off-colour and white speckles covering the images.

Fuji includes ISO 3,200 and ISO 6,400 at a reduced resolution of 4 megapixels. This does help keep noise from becoming much worse than it is at ISO 1,600. However, we didn't see any advantage, either. We'd stay below ISO 800 when shooting with the S8000fd whenever possible and don't recommend shooting at ISO 1,600 or above at all.

Conclusion
If forced to choose between the S8000fd and the SP-550 UZ, we'd probably go with the Fuji, but only based on its faster performance. Of the trio of 18x zooms, the Panasonic DMC-FZ18 looks to be the best option, though it, too, has its problems.

Additional editing by Shannon Doubleday