Fujifilm FinePix S100FS review

The S100FS is the most impressive non-SLR camera we've seen in a long time.

Its lens has a massive 14.3x zoom, starting at a wide-angle 28mm, and can focus on subjects just 1cm away. The camera is bigger than many digital SLRs, but the substantial design feels robust and is extremely comfortable to hold. It's littered with single-purpose hands-on controls, including lens rings for zoom and focus, a command dial for adjusting exposure, more dials for adjusting the focus mode and light-metering area, and an ISO speed button. The screen is hinged for shooting at awkward angles, but its 2in diagonal is a bit small on a camera that's otherwise so well endowed.

Performance is fantastic, capturing a photo every second in the normal shooting mode. Continuous mode is sadly no faster, though, and falls short of the 3fps continuous speeds of similarly priced digital SLRs. However, it can capture seven shots at 2.9fps, or 50 3-megapixel shots at 6.7fps. The large number of controls makes manual adjustments easy but the menus could be better laid out. The white balance control is buried too deep for our liking, while the RAW mode is mysteriously hidden in the Set-up menu rather than being listed among the Quality options.

The FS suffix stands for film simulation and refers to the camera's ability to imitate the properties of film. The Provia and Velvia presets are named after specific Fujifilm film stock, with the latter producing more vibrant colours and stronger contrast. Ultimately, the colour presets available on most digital SLRs are more useful as they can be customised, but it's a welcome feature nonetheless.

Another new feature for Fujifilm is dynamic-range processing which, it is claimed, preserves subtle highlights and shadow tones in high-contrast scenes. We have seen similar features in cameras from Olympus, Nikon and Sony but this one works a little differently. Rather than simply boosting the brightness of darker parts of photos to reveal details within them, it doubles or quadruples the shutter speed and boosts the brightness of everything but the highlights. As such, it doesn't noticeably recover details in shadows but it does rescue clipped highlights - something the other manufacturers don't manage so well. The inevitable downside is an increase in noise levels, and this manifests itself throughout the photo rather than only in shadows as with rival systems. The system is in effect using a faster ISO speed in all but the highlight areas of the photos. It's a shame the S100FS can't rescue both highlights and shadow simultaneously, but the latter is easier to perform in software on the PC, albeit at the expense of even more noise.

Eleven million pixels is a lot to fit on a camera's sensor but the S100FS's 2/3in CCD is larger than any other we've seen in a fixed-lens camera - it has almost three times the surface area of the 1/2.5in sensors used in most ultra-zoom cameras. This largely explains why the S100FS's noise levels are much lower than those of its competitors'. Fujifilm's updated noise-reduction processing helps too, with a less aggressive approach that lets a little more noise through but doesn't sacrifice detail and avoids the unnatural watercolour-like effect produced by older designs. Noise levels weren't as low as on digital SLRs (which have even bigger sensors) but they weren't far off. Details were even sharper than from many 10-megapixel SLRs, although they were tainted by chromatic aberrations towards the corners of photos. These were clearly visible only on sharply contrasting lines, but the problem was often quite pronounced.