Fuji FinePix s8000fd

Reviewed April 2008

Characteristics

At the heart of the S8000fd is the RP II processor. It has better noise reduction properties than its predecessors. Coupled with the processor is a CCD sensor measuring 1/2.35 of an inch and supporting eight million effective pixels.

On average, the unit took about 3.5 seconds to start-up and 2.5 seconds between shots. Those aren't speed demon times, but they're adequate for most situations.

The camera supports five image sizes from 3264 x 2448 pixels to 640 x 480 pixels. Pictures are stored in JPEG format. RAW is not supported. At the unit's highest resolution, there are two quality levels, fine and normal. Images shot in fine mode have a compression ratio of about 2.2 to 1; in normal, 4.4 to 1. There's a specialty 3:2 size, 3264 x 2176 pixels, with compression roughly equivalent (4.5 to 1) to normal mode. Compression ratios for the remaining image sizes range from 3.7 to 5.7 (see compression table).

Video with sound can also be shot with the S8000fd. Video is stored in AVI format; sound in WAV. Two video resolutions are supported, 640 x 480 and 320 x 240. Test clips shot for comparative purposes showed that the file size for video at 640 x 480 was 23.3MB; at 320 x 240, 22.6MB. Video shot with the camera was good--useable for home documentaries. Surprisingly, the sound was even better than that of my budget tape-based camcorder. The camera's optical zoom couldn't be used while shooting video, but it could be used to frame shots. So if you want a close up, you stop your video recording, zoom in on your subject, then start shooting your video again. As awkward as that sounds, it actually promotes better video technique by discouraging excessive zooming, a hallmark of neophyte camcorder jocks.

There's a continuous mode, where the unit will continually focus on a subject within an AF frame that appears on its display or in the electronic viewfinder. This allows you to keep a moving subject in focus. One drawback to this mode is that it saps power from the DSC because the unit's motors are constantly churning away making focusing adjustments.

There's a manual focusing mode that's awkward to use. In it, you need to hold down the Exposure Compensation button while using the zoom control to focus on a subject. A pair of upended parentheses on the camera's display will turn yellow when your subject is in focus.

And there's an AF mode with three options. The Center option focuses on a subject at the center of the display. A Multi option will focus the camera on a subject near the center of a shot and place a focusing frame over it. The Area option gives you control over what should be the center of focus in a shot by manually moving the focus frame around the display.

In low light conditions, auto focusing can be assisted with an illuminator LED located at the front of the camera.

The unit also has a face recognition mode where the camera will place focusing frames around faces in a shot.

Shooting at normal speed at the wide end of the zoom range, the unit's lens has a range of 2.3 feet to infinity; at high speed, the range is a foot less, 3.3 feet to infinity. With the zoom fully extended in telephoto mode, the range is the same for both normal and high speed shooting, 4.9 feet to infinity. For the lens' macro modes, the wide range is 3.9 inches to 2.6 feet; the telephoto, 3.9 to 11.5 feet; and for its Super Macro mode, 0.4 to 3.9 inches.

Shutter speeds for the S8000fd span four seconds to 1/2000 second.

In Mult mode, the camera assesses the lighting in a scene and chooses what it thinks the best exposure will be. It's essentially doing what's done when you choose a scene mode, except it's only doing it for an exposure setting.

In Spot mode, exposure is optimized for the center of shot. This method is good for scenes full of areas with contrasting lighting. You want to make sure the target of your shot is properly exposed and are not too concerned about the rest of it.

The S8000fd runs on four AA batteries. From the quartet of Panasonic LR6 Industrial batteries included with the camera, I shot about 170 photos and 5.5 minutes of video before needing a fresh set of power sticks. That included flash and flashless pictures, as well as constantly turning the camera off and on just to look at the display to test navigation options.

The bytecam has 58MB of internal memory. That's good enough for around 14 fine quality and 29 normal quality photos sized at 3264 x 2448 pixels; 32 images at 3264 x 2176; 57 at 2304 x 1728; 91 at 1600 x 1200; and 448 at 640 x 480. It's also enough for 62 seconds of 640 x 480 video and 17 minutes of 320 x 240 video.

Storage capacity for the unit can be increased with optional storage cards. Both xD, SD and SDHC cards are supported. All things being equal, more pictures can be stored on an xD card than an SD cards. For instance, a 1GB xD card can hold 261 fine quality images, compared to 252 for a 1GB SD card. However, the largest capacity xD card is only 2GB, while SDHC cards reach 8GB.

What's more, Eye-Fi supports the SD platform. Eye-Fi is an SD card with built-in WiFi connectivity. It will upload photos from a camera to a PC over a wireless network automatically. For still images, the card worked without a hiccup with the S8000fd. Video files had to be uploaded manually. Not only was it easy working with the files on a PC, but they could be smoothly imported into iMovie 2008 on a MacBook, too.

To activate the camera's "intelligent" pop-up flash, a button on the left side of the unit must be pressed. Unlike the one-flash-intensity-fits-all devices found on many point-and-and-shooters, this flash analyzes a scene and modifies its output accordingly. It doesn't always work--no automatic feature in any camera does--but I found the flash pictures taken with the unit better than average.

Flash recycle times with fresh batteries were around 3.4 seconds. Range for the unit is 1.6 to 26.2 feet in normal mode and 1 to 9.8 feet in macro mode. The flash has four settings--auto, forced, suppressed and slow sync--and red-eye works in all of them except suppressed mode.

Auto is the intelligent mode. The flash will fire depending on how the camera assesses the lighting conditions in a scene.

Forced mode will fire the flash whenever you snap a shot. It's useful when a subject is backlit or a scene is brightly lit. {insert photo}

Slow Synchro is designed for night shots. It allows you to expose both your subject and a nightscape behind them. Since this mode uses low shutter speeds, it's recommended that a tripod be deployed when using it.

To suppress the flash, you simpy pop it into the camera's body and shoot using available light.

In addition, flash intensity can be increased and decreased in one-third increments manually from the camera’s flash menu.

Standards supported by the camera are DCF, Exif 2.2, DPOF, NTSC/PAL, USB 2.0, PTP/MTP and PictBridge.