Fujifilm FinePix Z5fd review

It's not quite as stunning as Sony's T100, but the Z5fd is nevertheless a stylish gadget with its ultra-slim design, 2in 230,00-pixel screen and glowing logo on the front of the camera.

The standard silver finish looks great but we love the Raspberry and Mocha Brown finishes even more.

The camera has some smart features that are well signposted to help users find them. Face detection has a dedicated button, along with the obligatory animated onscreen squares to show it in action. Another button cycles between automatic mode, a high-sensitivity mode (sensibly labelled anti-blur) and Natural and Flash. The latter shoots with and without the flash in quick succession, allowing you to choose the best picture later. The remaining options are standard for a compact camera, although we're disappointed that there are no metering options. Performance could be better at 2.3 seconds between shots, and the continuous mode is no faster. Using the flash doesn't slow the camera down but browsing shots stored on an xD card is particularly slow. Sadly, Fujifilm's recent trend for combination xD/SD slots isn't continued here. The slim design also means a slim battery, and its 282-shot life is disappointing.

Our image-quality tests revealed Fujifilm's usual knack for superb colours on automatic settings, with vibrant, natural tones and excellent handling of highlights in high-contrast scenes. However, the automatic settings were too ready to jump to high ISO speeds, even in fairly bright conditions. This led to significant noise-reduction artefacts, smearing fine detail and creating jagged edges to straight lines. These pictures still looked excellent when viewed onscreen or printed at standard sizes, but they didn't stand up to close inspection.

There are few ultra-compact cameras available at this price, but Sony's DSC-W35 is a better example and costs less.