Slim, stylish and lightweight, FujiFilm's FinePix F440 is a 4-megapixel camera and, while it has a couple of features that set it apart from the opposition, it uses a standard CCD sensor rather than the SuperCCD that FujiFilm has used in a good number of its other cameras. Measuring just 74.5 x 6.3 x 21.3mm and weighing a mere 150g, the all-metal FinePix F440 could be easily lost in your coat pocket and it has a better build quality than some of the FujiFilm range.
What is particularly interesting is its 3.4x optical zoom lens, which has a focal length of 6.3 to 21.6mm (equivalent to a 38 - 130mm lens on a 35mm camera). There's also a huge (for this size of camera) 2-inch, 154,000-pixel LCD display, which unfortunately becomes almost unusable in low light conditions. The shutter speed ranges from 2 to 1/2000 seconds with aperture stops between F2.8 and F7.4. It takes the FinePix F440 around two seconds to warm up and extend the lens before you can start using it.
The camera comes with a good number of pre-set modes. To aid you in your picture taking there are four scene modes; portrait, landscape, sports and night scene. There is also a good selection of white balance settings; Fine, Shade, Fluorescent light (Daylight), Fluorescent light (Warm White), Fluorescent light (Cool White) and Incandescent light to help get the best depth of colour for your photos.
The built-in flash also has a number of different settings; auto, red-eye reduction, forced flash and suppressed flash in auto mode. If you want to set it up manually there are just two choices; slow synchro and red-eye reduction plus slow synchro. The flash itself has a range of between 0.6 and 3.6m if used in wide angle mode, and in telephoto mode between 0.6 and 2m. The FinePix F440 doesn't support external flash units.
All the controls are well positioned on the back of the camera, but if you have large fingers you may find the four-way controller switch a bit fiddly. The menu is basic but well designed and easy to use, but remember to switch the camera into manual mode otherwise many of the menu options will not be available to you. Once properly set up, the quality of the photos is as good as you'd expect from a camera of this resolution, with solid colours, consistent light balance and good focus.
A lithium-ion battery is included, but this only allows around 150 photos to be taken before you have to recharge it. It takes around two hours to recharge, in or out of the supplied camera dock. FujiFilm bundles an xD picture card with the FinePix F440 and while it is nice to have, it is a mere 16MB in capacity. You really need 128MB as a starting point.
