It's all looks

So I got this camera for one reason only - looks. And as far as that, it delivered like Domino's.

The Fuji Z10 is a very small, super cute camera with a non-extending lense. It is easy to take anywhere and attracts plenty of attention. But although I didn't even try to pretend that I wanted it for its abilities or specifications, I was expecting at least a semi acceptable performance. For that, I was bitterly disappointed.

The 7.2 Mp matrix should be plenty for any type of pictures. My old camera was a 4.2 Mp Sony, which took much sharper and clearer pictures. Only comes to show that megapixels are really not all that important when it comes to digital cameras.

I am not really sure why exactly I got rid of the Sony, well other than I simply hate that brand. When I was choosing a replacement I had 2 simple criteria: something cute, that uses SD memory cards. Which is why I was very happy to find that Fuji (unlike Sony) had finally come to its senses and decided to allow SD cards on top of its proprietary xD ones.

As I said, I wasn't disappointed with the looks of the camera. The sliding cover on the front works very well and the camera is ready to shoot in less than 2 seconds. The flash also charges super fast. The focusing on the other hand felt rather slow. After taking a picture the camera is ready for another in under 2 seconds without the flash, and in about 4 with the flash. The battery seems to last forever, I just wish that the charger, or rather the power cord was more compact. The charger and the battery are really small, but there is a full size power cord, which to me ruines the cuteness of the package.

Regrettably the design, speed, and battery life are the only positives I can come up with for this camera.

The point that matters most - image quality - is below even mediocre expectations. I am sorry, but it has nothing to do with not knowing how to use the camera or its settings. The pictures are barely acceptable under any circumstances even in bright day light.

There are several problems I have with the image quality. The one that bothers me the most is the severe barrel distortion, which I am guessing is due to the non-protruding lense. Anything that falls close to the edges of the shots is seriously distorted.

The next big shortcoming is the sharpness. There is simply not enough detail in the images. They always come out looking soft and slightly blurry. The image stabilization feature adds a rather artificial look to the images.

Lastly, the light balance is almost impossible to achieve. In bright day light pictures always seem to look over-exposed, while in less than perfect lighting there is too much noise.

The included presets rarely perform better than the fully automated mode. The most useful one I find to be the mode which takes one shot with the flash and a second without. In general I've noticed pictures without the flash usually come out better.

One area where this camera does relatively well is its macro mode. Related to this is the Text mode, which I used quite regularly. I find it easier and faster to take picture from library books or magazines, than to waste money and paper on photocopies. Again though, the barrel distortion on the text towards the edges is quite noticable.

Couple of random observations: there is no dedicated movie button, activating the movie mode is done through the menus, which could be slow;
manual adjustments are pretty much non-existent;
the delete button only allows deleting one frame at a time, the only way to erase all at once is to perform a format;
there is no burst mode;
there is no focus assist light making focusing in low light even slower;
the screen seems to have very low resolution and looks grainy;
the red eye effect is rather pronounced with this camera and there is no in-camera red eye removal tool;
pressing the play button switches to review mode but to get back to shotting mode you have to tap the shutter, with the cover closed press and hold the play button to just review images, then press and hold again to turn the camera off.



I haven't haven't had this camera even for a year yet, but because of it's poor image quality I am already looking for its replacement. It does have its appeal, its very cute, super fast, and lasts a long time on a charge, so if the quality of the pictures is not essential it does better than any phone's camera, but that's about it as far as quality goes. Even a super cheap HP camera I had briefly took better pictures than this. I think from now on I am just going to resist my shallowness, and stick with cameras with extending lenses.