The Fujifilm Finepix F30 has
a classy metal exterior, a 2.5-inch monitor and offers shooting
modes beyond the standard "Auto" mode —
which in the case of the F30 is completely reliable as it
adjusts the sensitivity reasonably. Aperture Priority
and Shutter Priority share a single Mode Dial setting,
while the "Manual" mode, which is in fact
a Program mode, offers some control over the metering,
the auto focus, and the sensitivity.
Moreover, the F30 also offers Fujifilm's Natural Light
mode, the first of 15 Scene modes, which is designed
to capture images under low light, without the use of flash
adjusting sensitivity as needed.
These modes are rounded off with the Anti-Shake mode,
a mode that boosts sensitivity in order to maintain a camera-shake
free shutter speed.
In fact a quite a few of the F30's shooting modes take advantage
of its most outstanding feature: a wide range of sensitivities,
and little or no noise at 100 and 200 ISO.
The Finepix F30 sensitivity
range covers from 100 to 3200 ISO, a rare capability in a
compact camera, but what is even more unusual is that even
at 800 ISO, the F30's images compare well to what many other
compacts produce at 400 ISO; while at 400 ISO, they can be
compared to 100 and 200 ISO images.
Similarly, at 1600 and 3200 ISO, images contain noise, and
it can readily be seen when these are inspected at 100% scale
on a monitor, however, when printed out to a 4x6 inch size,
the results are surprisingly good.
Aperture: f4, shutter speed: 1/300 sec, 100 ISO.
Nevertheless, at 1600 and 3200 ISO,
the images of the Finepix F30 show artefacts such as fuzziness
on the edges of imaged objects, and contain visibly less detail
than the same image shot 100 ISO.
Aperture: f5, shutter speed: 1/400 sec, 100 ISO.
In use, the F30 is a quick camera.
Fast to start, fast to focus and fast to decide the exposure,
and fast to save photos.
Indeed, the only time the camera shows some hesitation is
when, for one reason or another, it has trouble auto focusing.
While the F30 is equipped with an AF assist lamp, it only
works when the camera is used indoors, but is ineffective
when the camera is set to Macro mode, or when capturing photos
at night of a distant subject. And with the latter, an infinity
focus setting would have been a useful feature.
As with a number of other Fujifilm
cameras, the F30 has a very limited choices for compression.
Only the highest resolution, 6-megapixel, offers a Fine or
Normal setting. The 6M Fine image quality uses a compression
that operates in the 5:1 to 6:1 range, which, once again,
in comparison to many current compact cameras is quite reasonable.
Still, it is regrettable that the other images sizes do not
have the same choice.
Photos captured using the wide
angle end of the zoom exhibit only a very slight amount of
barrel distortion. However, given the right contrast conditions,
a chromatic aberration — a purple fringe that appears
on the edges of dark image elements captured near bright ones
— can be seen.
But at the telephoto end, images are free of any pincushion
distortion, and show no trace of chromatic aberration. Moreover,
whatever the focal length, the F30's images have excellent
vibrant colours, particularly if the Chrome setting is used.
Aperture: f5, shutter speed: 1/420 sec, 200 ISO.
Although it sounds impressive, the
6.2X digital zoom of the F30 that combines with the 3X optical
zoom to create a 18.5X zoom effect is best left to its default
setting: Off. The digital zoom is a simple interpolation zoom
and is best avoided as it degrades the image quality very noticeably,
particularly important since the FinePix F30 yields excellent
images.
Fujifilm has equipped the F30
with a sharp, high-resolution monitor, which goes a long way
in making the lack of an optical viewfinder less of a problem.
The monitor's screen is detailed and bright, and its brightness
can be increased for a shot at the press of the up arrow of
the 4-direction control, a very useful feature when shooting
outdoors under the sun, or indoors in a darkened room.
And worth noting, although equipped with a very small flash,
the F30 manages quite well when capturing image in a dark
room, once again, thanks to its broad sensitivity range.
With flash photos using the Auto
shooting mode, the F30 generally does not increase the sensitivity
to help the effect of the flash past 400 ISO, staying within
a reasonably low noise range. On occasion however it will
go as high as 800 ISO, and enter a range where the image looses
detail. The Manual mode on the other hand can be forcibly
limited by setting the sensitivity to Auto 400 ensuring
that the image will keep some detail.
Still, these high sensitivities
have their uses, especially if they are used outdoors in daylight,
when they can produce some interesting, painting-like results.
The F30's strength lies in its ability to capture images
at up to 400 ISO that compare very well with the 200 ISO images
of other cameras. Moreover, the F30 yields excellent colours,
and detailed, low-noise images up to 400 ISO.
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