Excellent compact camera with a 10x zoom lens

Author's Rating:

Pros: Excellent quality photos
Fast start up
Great battery life
Lots of modes and user customisation

Cons: No review start up mode

The Bottom Line: 
A top quality camera, that takes excellent photos and has a really useful zoom lens

Author's Review
I bought my wife this camera for Christmas. Her old camera was getting slow to recharge the flash and was starting to struggle in a few areas as it was 4 years old.

I spent about 2 weeks surfing the web and reading reviews on a whole range of compact cameras. My wife had only 2 real specs when looking for a camera, must be fast enough to catch our 2.5 year old son in action and secondly, must have a big screen.

I looked at all the usual suspects such as Canon Ixus, Nikon Coolpix, etc, however this Fujifilm F70 EXR kept cropping up in Top Tens and Best Buys, so I decided to take a closer look. All the reviews I found on it were favourable and with the bonus of the 10x zoom lens I decided to go for it.

I bought it direct from the Fujifilm website with a discount code, for £115.

It has proved to be a real success with my wife, who has been delighted with the quality of the photos and the speed the camera operates.

The camera comes in the box with instruction manual, wrist strap, battery and a charger. The charger is excellent with a built in plug, so you plug it into the wall socket and pop the battery into it. Must better than having to cradle up the camera or have leads running around.

The camera body is fully metal, with plastic buttons. It comes in silver or gunmetal, I opted for silver as I thought is was more "girly". It seems to be very solidly built, with all edges meeting closely and switches and buttons give a reassuring click.

Here is a list of the specs:

1/2" 10 Megapixel Super CCD EXR sensor
10x Fujinon optical zoom (27mm to 270mm)
27mm wide-angle lens
Slim and stylish and only 22.7mm thin
EXR Priority - Manual Sensor switching
EXR Auto - Automatic Sensor optimisation
NEW Pro Focus mode for professional looking portrait shots
NEW Pro Low-light mode using multi-frame processing for minimal noise in low-light conditions
2.7" High Contrast, Wide-view LCD screen
Get creative with five Film Simulation Modes
Dual Image Stabilisation for blur-free shots

From pressing the power button, it takes about 3 secs for the lens to extend and the live preview to appear on the screen. However you are able to take a properly focused photo only 1 second later, a total of 4 from pressing start, which is useful if a surprise photo opportunity arises.

Unfortunately, there is no way I can find to start straight into review mode without the lens extending. I think this is a bit of a slip up from Fujifilm, especially given the length the lens extends.

The camera is 10 Megapixels, but you can choose to reduce that in the menus to lower resolutions (9, 7, 5, 4, 3, 2) and also ratios (16:9, 4:3, 3:2). It also takes video in two modes, 320 and 640.

There is a range of modes on the camera, from fully auto right through to manual. Also there are the EXR modes which are as follows according the instruction manual.

High Resolution Priority

When you want to achieve the maximum detail possible, and the subject doesn't demand the extra dynamic range provided by Dual Capture Technology or the class leading Signal to Noise performance of Pixel Fusion Technology, Super CCD EXR can be used in HR mode to capture full twelve megapixel images with breathtaking levels of fine detail.

Signal to Noise Priority

Boosting sensitivity on conventional sensors has always resulted in increased noise, and efforts to control this noise have resulted in blurred images and loss of resolution when shooting in low light. To combat this EXR 'couples' same colour pixels together to create larger, giant pixels that can record more detail in low light and limit noise.

Dynamic Range Priority

If you have ever seen a pale blue sky turn white in a photograph then you have experienced one of the biggest problems facing all compact digital cameras: limited dynamic range.

To be honest we just run the camera in fully automatic mode most of the time because we find it does an excellent job and the photos are of high quality. We also just run it at 5 Megapixels because we get more on the SD card and we only look at our photos on the laptop or load them to Facebook.

The battery life of the camera is also excellent, with it easily lasting 2-3 days of holiday snapping and reviewing. I don't know what the official battery life is, but we find it perfect.

Overall I can't sing the praises of this camera enough, any flaws with it are minor and picky.