Fujifilm FinePix S8100fd review

Fujifilm's S8000fd was a milestone for the company's ultra-zoom camera range, with its astonishing 18x zoom and optical image stabilisation.

The latter is essential for an ultra-zoom camera, yet was missing from previous Fujifilm models. It wasn't the only 18x zoom camera, though. Panasonic, Olympus and Nikon all have similar cameras built around a 10-megapixel sensor. Just six months after the launch of the S8000fd, Fujifilm has added 100 to the product name and two million pixels to the sensor to bring it in line with the competition.

There's little else to distinguish the S8100fd from its predecessor. Its appearance is almost identical, except for a couple of changes to the labelling of buttons. A new Zoom Bracket option on the mode dial stores three pictures, the second two being cropped versions of the first. Saving them is slow, and it seems pointless as pictures can be cropped easily after shooting on the camera or a PC. The self-timer has been relegated to the menu in favour of a dedicated button for continuous shooting and exposure bracketing. This may be useful, but it also highlights the poor continuous performance: 0.5fps is a third that of Panasonic's DMC-FZ18, although alternative modes capture fewer or lower-resolution shots at a faster pace. The camera is slow in general use, too, with autofocus times between one and two seconds contributing to a three-second gap between shots.

Image quality is nothing special, and there's little tangible improvement over the S8000fd. The higher resolution brings slightly more detail in bright conditions, but noise levels - and detail-slaying noise reduction - are more pronounced in low light. Chromatic aberrations and lens distortions are still evident. We recommend shopping around for the older model, which is currently available for around £150, or opting for Panasonic's superior DMC-FZ18.