Fujifilm FinePix F50fd - Review

The popular compact camera isn't made for taking great night shots. Reason being your digital camera's flash has too short a throw distance and the aperture is too small for nice night shots.

Your digital camera may have a great image stabilizer system, but it'll be useless at night. Enter Fujifilm with their digital cameras that come with super-high light sensitivity.

The Fujifilm F50fd digital camera is a 12-megapixel, 3x optical zoom with a 2.7-inch LCD shooter. But at 155g, the Fujifilm F50fd digital camera is still decidedly clunky - but hey, look on the bright side, this camera can go up to ISO 6400. Also, with a CCD shift stabilizer system, the F50fd's has image stabilizing as well, and also supports the xD, SD and SDHC memory card types.

This digital camera has many onscreen help captions in its menu. Buttons are well-spaced, and the user interface easy to use/learn. There's also a convenient italicized "F" button that serves as a shortcut menu for ISO, megapixel quality and color mode.

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The FinePix F50fd took 2.4 seconds to start up and capture its first JPEG photograph. Subsequent JPEG shots took 2.14 seconds between shots with the flash turned off, and 2.4 seconds with the flash turned on. That's right on par with the current crop of 12-megapixel shooters.

The F50fd's shutter lag is measured to be at an impressive 0.5 to 0.9 seconds, depending on lighting conditions. However, the camera does feel sluggish at times, especially when recharging between shots.

ISO Settings

You can shoot at 12 megapixels all the way to ISO 1,600. After that, at ISO 3,200, the megapixel cap is 6 megapixels. Up the ISO to 6,400 and the cap lowers to 3 megapixels. The noise level steadily gets worse the higher the ISO you go.

ISO Image Quality: From ISO 100 to ISO 800 and ISO 6,400. Click to enlarge.

If you prefer more natural shots by not using flash at night, then noise should be an acceptable component. The automatic white balance handles colors well and images have a decent dynamic range. However, there are some bright scenarios when the camera overexposures - this is when you need to manually compensate for exposure.

Good thing then that the F50fd offers onboard aperture/shutter priority controls that allow tweaking of 1-1/1,000 seconds for shutter speed and F2.8-8 for aperture. However, you can't tweak both aperture and shutter speeds at the same time.

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The LCD also offers 10 levels of screen brightness but having so many levels may be overkill. The image review mode also puts in 100 thumbnails on its 2.7-inch screen, which is a bit too much.

Auction Mode

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There's also Auction Mode that is very helpful when you want to compose a composite picture to showcase your product to sell online on eBay or something. Just pick a template, snap the pictures, and the F50fd will put it all together in an attractive image.