Under Development

Posted on 21 Feb 2003 at 12:12

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Gallery

Santa was pretty good to me last year and, with a little help from Mrs R, delivered a Fuji Finepix S602 digital camera on Christmas morning.

Regular readers will know that I've moaned for ages about the price of decent digital cameras that allow you to control what you want when you want in the manner of a conventional 35mm SLR camera. Until recently the cost of such beasts was around a grand, which in my view is way too much.

While my old Olympus 1000, bought in 1998, is still perfectly serviceable, it's beginning to show its age in terms of relative performance even compared to the cheapest point-and-shoot digital cameras. It has some very good points: it is a true SLR (so what you see is really what you get), has good spot metering and a 3x optical zoom (way ahead of its time). However, it yields only 1,024x768 pictures, won't use SmartMedia cards bigger than 8Mb and, if you try powering it with AA cells, has a battery life you can measure in minutes. I've always got round this problem by using an external rechargeable pack or a mains adaptor for indoor shots.

Still, I'm a big fan of digital photography and find that I take far more and better shots with a digital camera than I ever did with my Pentax 35mm film SLR. That's probably because you can review any shot you take right away and, in many cases, retake it if the first attempt isn't quite right. There's also the lack of processing cost - I'm a Yorkshireman, remember - and besides I view most of my pictures onscreen rather than printing them. So I've found myself hankering after a new digital camera for a while - not a full professional model with the associated costs, but something with the specification of an Olympus E10, which looks like a conventional SLR but costs around £500.

Grade expectations
Until the recent arrival of the Fuji Finepix 602 nothing quite made the grade. Cameras usually failed on price, as most that met my specification criteria had street prices of at least £700. I had played with an E10 on my last visit to Shopper Labs and, while it had good features, I found that the delay between switching it on and being able to take a picture, and between pressing the shutter button and taking the picture, was rather long.

The Fuji 602 is much more responsive. It's ready to shoot a couple of seconds after it's switched on, and as soon as you press the shutter button it takes a picture with no noticeable lag at all. What's more, it has a feature list as long as your arm. For many shots the fully automatic mode works fine, but you can choose from scene program mode - which is for landscapes, sports, low light, portraits and so on - shutter priority, where you choose the shutter speed and the camera sets the aperture automatically, and aperture priority, which is the same as above but the other way round. It also has a full manual mode.

The camera has four basic picture resolutions: VGA 640x480; one megapixel (Mp) 1,280x960; 3Mp 2,048x1,536; and 6Mp 2,832x2,128. At 1Mp and 3Mp you can choose between normal and fine quality, and the 6Mp mode offers an extra high-quality mode. There's also a video mode where your 'film' length is limited by your available storage, which can be either to SmartMedia cards or IBM Microdrives. Out of the box it comes with one 16Mb SmartMedia card. I immediately added two 128Mb cards, which will hold up to 200 3Mp images each.

The camera hardware provides a maximum 3Mp resolution and gets the 6Mp using software interpolation. This is not just a gimmick to make the camera look better than it really is, however. The 6Mp images (even in 'normal' quality) are much more detailed than the 3Mp ones from any camera I've seen, and while the 6Mp mode may be a trick, it really does work. Just to put things in perspective, though, you'd normally use the 6Mp mode only if you wanted to print your pictures bigger than A4 size.