Fujifilm Finepix S1800

Author's Rating:

Pros: High quality pictures, small price tag, great camera design, good battery life, big screen.

Cons: Not "user friendly",  not great for motion shots.

The Bottom Line: 
Buy the camera if you want to put the time and energy into learning everything... If you don't have the time, I'd suggest a different camera.

Author's Review
So here's the deal. I'm no professional photographer. Really, my knowledge of cameras beyond "point and click" is pretty much non-existent. So when I read reviews about this camera being simple to use, and taking almost professional looking pictures I was pretty psyched. However, I wouldn't exactly say that is the case.

When you first take the camera out of the box, it looks great. It's the perfect size and weight, not to heavy, not to light. It feels durable, and it has a very attractive appearance. Taking pictures however is a different story.

If you just want to use the auto-set picture taking settings the camera takes great, high quality pictures. It's when I wanted to change the aperture and lighting that I ran into problems. It's not that the camera takes bad quality pictures, it's that it was quite complicated for me to figure out how to change the lighting and white balance etc. to fit what I wanted. If you don't get them just right the picture turns out dark or blurred. After a few weeks of messing around with different settings, I FINALLY figured out how to work everything (this is after I read the manual...3 times, and used various internet help sights). Now I can say that I agree with reviewers in that the camera takes professional quality pictures...but as far as simple and user friendly goes, it was anything but.