Fujifilm FinePix Z1

Reviewed August 2005

Image Quality

With respect to its build quality and finishing, and to its extremely compact size, there is little with which to fault the Fujifilm FinePix Z1.

The camera is powered on by sliding back the front cover, and is ready to shoot when the cover is opened, in less than a second. The same is true in use, the Z1 reacts quickly, be it the shutter release or its external controls. There is also an option to make the shutter release even faster offered in the menu, High-Speed Shooting, which soups up the camera, albeit at the expense of the battery's longevity.

With the Finepix Z1 engineers have had to mount the zoom lens totally internally, to keep the overall size of the camera as compact as it is.

The lens, a Fujinon 3X zoom that is equivalent to a 36 to 108mm, offers a standard focal length range that is well-adapted to most everyday subjects, and the needs of most users. Wide angle shots reveal that the lens has a bit of barrel distortion, and a slight chromatic aberration that appears as a purple fringe on the edges of contrasting elements in an image. At the telephoto end, images reveal a slight pincushion distortion, but exhibit no obvious chromatic aberration. Aside from this, throughout the focal range of the zoom, images show consistent sharpness from edge to edge.

The FinePix Z1 is devised as a simple to use camera that only requires a push of the shutter release to capture an image, and therefore, few user controls are provided.

Instead, the Z1 is equipped with 6 scene modes that cover the most common types of compositions, all of which automatically set the camera with the best settings for the subject. Only the Manual mode offers the possibility of compensating the exposure, adjusting the white balance or changing the way the auto focus operates.

Whatever the exposure mode however, metering is performed using a 64-segment metering pattern commonly used on most Fujifilm cameras, and with evenly lit subjects, the metering generally yields satisfactory exposures.

However, with subjects that contain strong highlights, we noted that the implementation of the 64-segment metering on the Z1 tended to give preference to shadows, sometimes at the expense of the highlights.

Moreover, when this situation arose, tinkering with the contents of the frame by changing the composition and then locking the exposure before re-framing the shot was of limited help. While at times it worked, at other times it could be difficult to obtain a proper exposure, a problem compounded by the lack of precision of the LCD monitor which is often a relatively poor tool to judge the brightness and contrast range of an exposure. And in such situations, the absence of alternative metering patterns, be it a centre-weighted pattern or a spot meter, was missed.

The Z1 offers two auto focus modes: Centre or Multi. Centre looks for a focus point at the centre of the frame, while Multi looks for the closest focus point within a wide area near the horizontal centre of the frame. We observed that while the Centre AF mode is reliable, the Multi AF is less so. With the Multi AF, the focus point selected by the system did not always coincide with what we wanted. On occasion the camera would decide that some point behind our subject — a point that the auto focus had found to have a greater contrast — was better than our subject in the foreground.

Set to 64 ISO, the Z1’s photos only show noise in the deeper shadow areas. When sensitivity is increased, noise also increases, a common phenomenon with many compact digital cameras.

Still, with the FinePix Z1 we tested, there are two aspects of its image quality we found to be disappointing. First, at the highest image quality (5M Fine) the camera produces images with file sizes that correspond to a compression ratio of 6:1, which is relatively reasonable. Yet, somehow, images often show what appear to be compression artefacts, and these clearly lower the definition of details in the image.

Second, when left to its default setting of Auto ISO and Auto Flash — something that a lot of users do — the camera compensates for the limited range of the flash by increasing sensitivity up to 640 ISO.

Yet, at this sensitivity level, the image quality deteriorates noticeably and photos can take on the appearance of images that have been transformed by a special effect such as a painting effect.

This said, the fact is that the Z1 is a camera that is intended as an easy-to-carry-around point and shoot, and its extremely compact size requires that complex optics be squeezed into a tiny space. Therefore it may be a bit unrealistic to expect that it can produce images that are as crisp as some of Fujifilm's larger cameras.