Style Over Substance?
May.2008

We were in friendly Singapore in May 2008 with a brown ultra compact Fujifilm FinePix Z100fd. Ultra compacts are all about being cool, not necessarily being the greatest. The Z100fd certainly looks sleek and even has some nifty shooting modes like 'auction' - for eBay, and 'text' - for espionage and James Bond wannabes.

 

Beautifully and solidly built, the camera is slim, but not too skinny. It's comfortable to hold and use. A nice feature not often seen, even in expensive cameras, is built-in digital distortion reduction that straightens out lines optically curved by the lens. Because CCD shift image stabilization, which the Z100fd uses, is not as effective as optical image stabilization, low light pictures without flash get blurry.

 

Overall image quality is not as good as the best competitors, but it's not terrible. The main issue that bothers us is not so much the image quality, but the difficulty in using the menu's user interface.

 

>> singapore photo gallery

HIGH
  • stylishly cool
  • nice physical controls and buttons
  • good 2.7 inch LCD
  • built-in distortion reduction

MIND
  • image quality could be better
  • difficult to use menu's user interface
  • charger with cord is bigger than camera

WISE
  • there might be better, but not prettier cameras than this one
CAMERA SPECS SUMMARY