With so many digital cameras on the market, you'd think that finding the right balance between fairly standard, slim, point-'n-click models that are designed principally for the amateur, and the chunkier, higher spec machines geared to the professional photographer should be relatively easy, as long as you have someone to guide you through the maze.
It's even better, then, when you come across a camera where the principal concerns for the amateur have been seriously examined and a few extra features thrown in that are only normally available for the pro. Such is the case with FujiFilm's FinePix F10.
For a start it comes in a sturdy silver metal housing that feels comfortingly solid yet will fit easily in a handbag or jacket. A slight niggle is that it doesn't come with a carrying case so you'll have to buy that separately (there is an optional underwater case that would be ideal for filming fish on holidays). The controls are clearly labelled, easy to use and it takes a mere second after switch-on for the camera to be ready for action.
There's a large 2.5-inch LCD display which can be brightened in darker conditions, but some photographers will bewail the fact that there isn't an additional optical viewfinder. The camera features an F2.8 - 5.0, 3x optical zoom lens with a focal range of 8 - 24mm (which is equivalent to 36 - 108mm) and a powerful flash that ranges from 0.6 - 6.5m at wide angle and has six modes including red-eye reduction, forced, suppressed (good for indoors) and slow synchro (for night shooting where you want to highlight both the foreground and background).
There are two essential elements that make this camera stick out from the crowd. The first is that it is a 6.3-megapixel Super CCD HR camera with FujiFilm's new Real Photo Technology, designed to produce the best quality images at the lowest light settings. The result is a far greater range of ISO (sensitivity) settings, ranging from 80 - 1600, with an auto setting that tends to defer to 800. So now you can often dispose of the flash entirely and still produce remarkably detailed quality images in low light conditions.
The Scene Positions menu offers this Natural Light setting as well as the more usual Portrait, Landscape, Sport and Night modes. The lagging time between exposures has also been considerably tightened so you don't have that irritating gap between pressing the shutter and waiting for the click. There's even a high-speed shooting mode that reduces the focusing time and you can capture up to 40 frames in continuous shooting mode.
It's therefore a shame that the standard XD Card that comes in the box is a measly 16MB when you should be looking for around 512MB, especially as there's also a video mode available.
Which brings us neatly to the F10's other huge selling point - the battery life. FujiFilm claims that the rechargeable lithium-ion battery (which peculiarly needs three leads to recharge) will allow you to take 500 photos before you need to think about it again. Judging by early user reports this seems to be fairly accurate. If so, and at this reasonable price range, the FinePix F10 could be an essential holiday accessory.
