The compact camera seems to have reached the end of its tether. The megapixel race is largely over (consumers are seeing the relationship between increasing megapixel count at the same sensor size and increasing noise) and cameras can't seem to get any smaller.
So instead of practical additions, manufacturers are pushing out zany features. Some Nikon and Sony cameras have Wi-Fi built-in. Olympus has digital cameras that are as tough as nails. Casio is partnering with YouTube. And the Fujifilm Z100fd, well, it's got a camera slider that glides ... diagonally.
Design
Yes, the Z100fd is fearless in the face of common slider design philosophy. Sony's T series does it vertically. The first Fujifilm FinePix Z1 and the Casio EX-V8 do it horizontal. So the oblique slider must be Fujifilm thinking outside the box.
Functionally, the diagonal slider works the same as a sideward version -- if you pull it from the side. It doesn't work when we tried from the top. But we like that the glide mechanism moves with a smooth, fluid motion.
But the Z100fd is more than a design aberration. It's one of the best-looking compact cameras to gallop out of the Fujifilm stable. In fact, we like to think that its brushed metal finish and straight utilitarian lines puts it on par with the best that Sony's got -- the Cyber-shot T200.
It's solid in feel and weight at 138 grams. The two-tone colour scheme is chic. Buttons are functional in design with good tactile depth, and that's true even for the too-tiny Display and Playback nubs beneath the scroll wheel.
And the scroll wheel? It's another pseudo celebration of the iPod's Click Wheel. The scroll is mechanical and the four compass points are clickable. But compared with the scroll wheel on the Nikon Coolpix S51c, it's unnecessarily stiff and doesn't allow for a smooth rolling motion. We found pressing on the compass points to be more accurate.
The menu is classic Fujifilm. There are tabs for fast browsing and the categorising of camera settings is generally neat.
But we didn't like how the scene selection, camera modes and camera settings are all accessed through the same button. Unlike the F50fd, which splits up access among three buttons, and thus quick access; the Z100fd have them all cobbled up together. This makes menu navigation irritating.
To make an immediate change to the ISO means clicking on the Menu button, scrolling up three items, clicking through and scrolling down another five items before you arrive at the ISO control. These tedious steps apply to other essential adjustments such as white balance and exposure compensation.
Another irk is that the camera, like the older Fujifilms, will throw you out of the menu controls once you have changed a setting. For example, after you have adjusted the date and time, you will need to jump through the same hoops in order to set the LCD brightness.
Features
The 8-megapixel Z100fd is not long on features. Its manual mode lets you tune only three extra options over other modes (exposure compensation, white balance and focusing) and doesn't let you tweak the more important aperture and shutter speed.
Light sensitivity goes up from a low ISO 64 to a high of ISO 1,600 though our traditional advice still stand -- keep firing below ISO 800 to avoid grain. For metering, the Z100fd has selections for just two, center and multi. While it works for most situations, we miss the flexibility of a spot metering option.
There are 13 scene modes to pick from, with the Fireworks mode surprisingly being the only point in the camera where the shutter speed can be minimally adjusted (4 - 0.5 seconds). To make up for the fact that you can't make adjustments, there are two more capture modes that automatically fine tunes settings without you getting your hands on it.
The first is "natural and flash" (two shots are taken, one with flash, the other without) and the other is "natural light" (light sensitivity is racked up). There's one more called the auction mode which features an intuitive image-stitching tool -- pick a template, snap the pictures, and the Z100fd will put it all together in an attractive image for eBay upload.
The Z100fd's 35mm equivalent lens is tight, but it does have an internal 5x optical zoom (pretty decent), though the use of it is enabled only in still capture and not video. There's also a single memory card slot that supports both xD Picture Card and SD/SDHC.
This camera is part of the new series of Fujifilms that incorporates a CCD-shift image stabilisation instead of the Japanese firm's previous reliance on high ISO to compensate for hand motion.
The Z100fd has the standard Face Detection feature. But oddly, for something that merely requires an activation command, it has a dedicated button, whereas more vital stuff like scene mode and exposure settings doesn't.
Performance
The Z100fd is marketed as a looker so we were not surprised by its scores. Compared with other 8-megapixel cameras, like the Sony Cyber-shot T2 and Panasonic Lumix FX-33, the Z100fd has a slower power-on-to-first-shot time (3.6s vs. 2.95s and 2.9s).
In shot-to-shot times, both with and without flash, it's one of the slowest. The new Sony Cyber-shot T200 easily piques it (1.41s vs. 2.42s).
Image quality
The Z100fd had a disconcerting habit of overexposing macro shots and images tended to suffer from clipped shadows. We found that the dynamic range was somewhat snipped due to the sacrifice of shadows to highlights.
Images captured by the Z100fd had doses of chromatic aberration around subjects of high contrast. We also found that these images were liable to bloom -- with the charge from the overexposed pixels of the sky overlapping the darker pixels of the leaves and brightening them in the process.
The automatic white balance works most of the time, though it tends to get tricked under tungsten lighting or an overcast sky.
Like most compact cameras, we detected noise and speckles at ISO 400. At ISO 800 and 1,600, details were muffled and noise was very much evident.
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