Full Review

Ok, quickly skimming over some of the other reviews, I do have to agree with most of them... but read on.

First and foremost, if you don't already own a digital camera, then you are missing out. This camera is easy and fun! After just a few minutes of quickly scanning the user manual, I was taking pictures, viewing them and zooming in on everyone's ugly mugs. Of course everyone hated their own pictures, on the other hand, everyone enjoyed browsing through the pictures taken mere seconds prior. Let's face it, pictures are fun, but they are only fun once everyone can check 'em out, right? If you don't have one already, then start looking and you could probably do worse than picking this particular model from Fuji.

I bought this particular camera mainly because of it's bang/buck ratio. A quick comparison at the time gave me a warm fuzzy because I felt that this would be a good purchasing decision. I still feel that way in fact. I'm not going to go into lurid detail on each and every feature. In fact, I feel there is enough information on this camera that I can skip them entirely and go directly to my personal experiences with it.

I was rather disappointed after draining the included batteries after a surprisingly short amount of time. On the other hand, I have taken over 100 pictures on just one set of regular Energizers and one set of Duracell Ultras (which are still in use, going strong!). Yes, many, if not most, of these were taken with the flash on. Hmm, now that I've checked it's actually 104 pictures that I have kept to be exact, I don't know how many others have been erased only to be re-shot with a better angle, lighting, etc. Almost every single picture was viewed on the LCD after the shot by multiple people, multiple times. I would say that's really not that bad all things considered...

On to red-eye. Ok, I'll admit it, yes, I was quite upset after linking to my PC only to discover that many pictures had a red-eye problem. What did I do? Well, er, nothing to those already taken...yet. But, ahem, that will be fixed, uh, when I get the time to retouch them. What else did I do? I made a mental note, "Mental note: dim light? need flash? subjects have eyes? red-eye reduction flash!" There, that done I went about and took the remainder of those 104 pictures with the red-eye flash (y'know, that annoying double flash). Yes, I'm sure this drains the battery even more, but keep in mind, my total of 104 pics includes approximately 30 indoors, red-eye reduction pictures. I'm still happy.

To finish this off, I'll quickly go through some of the things I really like about this camera that I haven't mentioned already. It's relatively small, fits in a nice leather camera pouch I found on sale for $15. The storage can be found at decent prices if you shop around; I found a 32 meg smartmedia card for $35. That's over 300 pictures at 640x480 regular (mid-level) compression or 80 pictures tweaked to 1280x960 with normal compression! It's pretty easy to use. The pictures really do look great regardless of size with normal compression. The camera itself feels firm and sturdy, I think it could survive a minor fall inside of it's carrying case (bought separately). Did I mention how much fun it is?

In closing, please, read the other reviews found here, everyone has an epinion and these could all be important in your decision to purchase your camera. Also check out the stats on the Fujifilm web: [ok, didn't like the long URL, go to http://www.fujifilm.com and just type in FinePix 1400 in the search field, you'll get plenty of info from there]. I include this because I noticed I got an error message while trying to follow the link on the epinions product page.