Only had this a couple of days but have found it a very capable little camera in most situations. I had seen some professional reviews claiming this produced quite brilliant photos but then a couple of user reviews that dismissed them as rubbish. I found the photos to be stunningly clear and vivid. They have little noise, strong colours, good contrast and very little fringing at the margins of light and dark but there was occasionally some vignetting with a little darkness in the corners. Macros came out well and the 10x optical zoom certainly gave me access to shots I would have missed with my old 3x compact.
I think the discrepency lies with the fact that it uses quite aggressive noise reduction which means that noise doesn't creep into photos until quite high ISO ratings. But, if you blow the photos up to a size where you can see pixel for pixel then you see an almost impressionistic painterly effect on areas of texture such as grass. But then why would you do this with 14 million pixel resolution - you should never need to blow it up this big. The extra pixels help to give smoother lines and subtle gradations of colour. Shown on a 46" 1080 TV screen the photos look great, the same would apply if you show them on a photo sharing site because no-one is going to view them on a 14M Pixel screen and I imagine they would print out at A4 size without a problem. If you want better you should go for a DSLR with a bigger sensor (and the big heavy expensive lenses) but that's like comparing a Fiat with a Ferrari.
The first time I was playing with it in the house the battery did seem to drain quickly but possibly this was due to leaving on it whilst fiddling with the menus and taking several flash photos. After taking many more photos outdoors and recharging the battery a couple of times it no longer seemed a problem. The battery charged each time within an hour or two and a spare is about £8.00
There does seem to be an occasional problem when the Auto-focus doesn't latch on to anything (and an overide to set it at infinity would have been handy) but this only happened a couple of times in 2 days and was overcome in one instance by locking focus on a different section of the scene and in another by switching to night-shot because it was approaching twilight.
Being able to easily program your favourite scene settings onto 2 of the function dial positions is fantastic. I normally have one set to the excellent panorama setting and the other set to action shot (so you can immediately capture the action instead of having to search through menus for the right setting) but on bon-fire nght I set one to the firework scene and the other to night-shot. The auto scene select function can be left on for most shots making it a great point and shoot camera for most situations.
I still haven't had chance to read the manual that comes on the disk or even explore all the menus so there may be more features I haven't explored but most functions seem easy to grasp if you've used a digital camera before.
I bought the camera as a suppliment to a larger more expensive camera - as a pocketable camera that I could have on me most of the time, that would still have enough features to capture the event in most situations - it seems perfect for the job. I did consider a couple of other alternatives including the Sony dsc-hx9v but this is nearly 3 times the price and nearly 100g heavier and I felt that was too much for my take everywhere second camera.
If you are a serious photographer and want a camera that will do everything then look elsewhere. If you don't expect miracles from a cheap tiny camera then you may be pleasantly surprised by how good the Fujifilm Finepix T200 can be.
| Package dimensions | 14.6 x 14.4 x 5.4 centimetres |
|---|---|
| Package Weight | 1.1 Pounds |
| Item dimensions L x W x H | 9.7 x 2.8 x 5.6 centimetres |
| Item Weight | 134 Grams |
| Brand | Fujifilm |
| Colour | Black |
| Has image stabilisation | Yes |
| Max Focal Length | 280 Millimetres |
| Min Focal Length | 28 Millimetres |
| Model year | 2011 |
| Part number | FinePix T200 Black |
| Zoom Type | Optical Zoom |
| Effective still resolution | 14 MP |
