Fuji FinePix V10 digital camera review

With summer officially here you want a camera that’s going to capture all those magic moments.  And the Fuji Finepix V10 is a top camera that’s compact enough to carry around all day in your bag or even your back pocket (providing you remember it’s there when you sit down). And there’s bags of functions to improve your photo taking.  It even comes with some games for when you’re bored of taking pictures.  With a three inch LCD, good ISP photo quality and 5-megapixel photos it’s not a bad buy.

Design
With its curved edges and slim physique, the V10 looks lovely.  And at only 3.3x2.5x1 inches it really is very slim.  Available in silver or bright tango orange, the camera has a flash at the front and a large 3 inch LCD at the back (there’s no optical view finder but which such a fine screen you don’t really miss it).  For all your functions including changing modes, flash, exposure, etc, there’s a dial placed just below the LCD which is too small to use comfortably.

Setup/Installation
It's only a small camera with a few functions so to just take pictures you don't have to do much.  The menu is easy to use and navigate your way around.  However if you want take full advantage of its features you might want to read the manual.

Features
You can have problems looking through view finders sometimes.  So Fuji have taken it out of the equation and instead added a 3 inch LCD.  Even in the sun light because of the bright colours it’s easy to see what you are shooting.  And it gives a multiple view function where the photo you are taking is reduced in size, and the last three pictures taken are show on screen.
Just below the LCD are all the functions you're going to need.  There’s six scene modes: portrait, landscape, sports, night scene, natural light and natural light/flash.  There is a manual option for exposure but the camera is really make for aim and click photography.  There’s a handy 3.4x zoom which extends from 38mm to 130mm and multipoint focus so you get a sharper image.  And you’ve got the option of recording around 15 minutes of moving image to at 640x480 resolution and sound.  As well as these and the games you also have the usual functions like red-eye reduction and white balance.

Performance
This is a relatively nice camera with plenty of features.  On the whole the camera feels very sturdy.  The 3 inch screen makes viewing very easy and the fact that it not only shows you the present view but also the last three shots you have taken means that if you like taking panoramic photos it’s idea.  However because they’ve used up most of the space to fit the LCD, it does mean when you’re taking a picture your fingers have to rest on the screen and this can sometimes feel a bit frightening as you feel your fingers could go right through the screen. The lens is a good size and rather than going for the more popular option of folding in, it actually pops out again giving more room for other functions.
Where they have scrimped on room is with the control panel.  The problem with squeezing so many functions in such a small case is that something has to give somewhere, and in this case it’s the control panel –which is so tiny that you might need the assistance of a magnifying glass and tweezers to turn the dial.  However the modes that are on there work pretty well.  There’s a fairly fast shooting rate with a shutter lag of between 8.5 – 0.8 seconds.  But high-speed shooting reduces shutter lag to almost nothing. The flash distributes light evenly as long as the subject isn’t too far away giving good skin tone colour.  What is really good is the natural light/flash mode – the camera automatically takes two photos in succession.  The first one uses the light available at the time and the second uses a flash, allowing you two options for later on. Like many compact cameras there was little point in including a manual function as the only thing you can really change is the white balance and EV but then you'd chose the V10 over an SLR so you didn't have to think about what you’re snapping. The moving picture function works quiet well too. Giving you up to 15 minutes of footage with sound, it means should the kids do something that little bit more interesting you can capture that too. 

What's In The Box?
Digital camera, USB cable, AV cable, hand strap, NP-40 Li-ion battery, 16 MB xD Picture Card, FinePix Viewer, ImageMixer VCD2 LE for FinePix, Raw file converter LE, and user manual.

Overall Opinion
On the whole the Fuji Finepix V10 digital camera is worth having. The design looks good and the photos that are produced are of a decent quality.  The fact that it has this huge screen makes taking photos a pleasure, however the small control panel can get on your wick after a while.