Fujifilm Finepix F60fd Review
Review Date: December 9th 2008
Author: Mark Goldstein
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Conclusion
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Ratings
(out of 5) |
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| Design | 4.5 |
| Features | 4.5 |
| Ease-of-Use | 4.5 |
| Image Quality | 4 |
| Value for Money | 4 |
The Fujifilm Finepix F60fd is virtually a carbon copy of the previous 12-month-old F50fd model, offering just a handful of new features at the same launch price. There really are very few differences between the two cameras, with the F60fd having a larger 3 inch LCD screen (although still with only 230k dots), effective Scene Recognition-AUTO mode for beginners (although not as clever as some competitors' systems) and an upgraded Face Detection system that can now detect faces at 90 degrees and rotated through 180 degrees. Even the launch pricing of £199 / $299 is identical, although this has quickly fallen to a very attractive street price of less than £150 / $250 if you look hard enough. All of the things that we liked about the F50fd still remain on the F60fd - an effective image stabilisation system, aperture and shutter priority modes and stylish design - but so do all of the things that we didn't like - no histogram in shooting or playback modes, limited 3x, 35-105mm lens, and no manual focus mode. As the F60fd uses the same sensor as the F50fd, the image quality is still unfortunately the same too, with noise appearing at ISO 400 and the faster speeds of 800-6400 not worth using at all, slightly soft images (which you can't change in-camera) and a below average macro mode.
In a bizarre twist of fate, however, we're actually going to rate the F60fd higher for image quality than its predecessor. How can you possibly do that, you may ask? Well, it's simply because all of its main rivals - the Ricoh GX200, Panasonic Lumix DMC-LX3 and even the twice-as-expensive Nikon Coolpix P6000 and Canon Powershot G10 - suffer from exactly the same problem of noisy images at ISO 400 and higher. In our review we mainly compared the older F50fd to its illustrious predecessor, the F31fd, a 6 megapixel camera that produced excellent results even at ISO 1600, but since you can no longer buy that model, the new F60fd becomes a real option as a pocket camera with manual controls, especially given the low street prices. The aggressive market push to include more and more megapixels has strangely worked in the Fujifilm F60fd's favour, and means that we can highly recommend it as an intuitive, attractive, competitively priced pocket camera that takes pictures that are every bit the equal of its more expensive rivals.
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