The Fujifilm Finepix F50fd is a frustrating beast. On one hand it offers a number of significant improvements when compared with the older F31fd, but on the other it takes a serious backwards step in terms of image quality, which is ultimately what every camera should primarily be judged by.
We whole-heartedly gave the F31fd a Highly Recommended award one year back at the start of 2007, commenting “this compact camera still has no rivals in terms of low-light performance”. This time around, the F50fd is no longer the low-light leader that the F31fd was.
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So if you were hoping the F50fd was the new high ISO performance leader, prepare for a disappointment. It may be no worse than rivals, but it’s certainly no better.
Where the F50fd does score though is its no-nonsense approach to common activities like indoor flash photography. Like the F30 / F31fd before it, the new FinePix is a great indoor party camera, focusing and exposing faces perfectly and increasing the ISO (if you allow it) to record greater background detail. Outdoors it also performs well and offers manual control over the aperture and shutter for creative effects.
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As long as you don’t mind the between-shot sluggishness or slight texture that the noise creates, even at lower ISOs when viewed on a monitor, then the Fujifilm FinePix F50fd would make a nice choice for advanced photographers looking for a pocket camera to supplement an SLR.
I say this not only because of the merits mentioned above, but also because the camera’s aperture- and shutter-priority modes give you up to 10 choices when choosing an aperture or shutter speed, while a lot of compact cameras with those shooting modes limit you to significantly fewer choices, sometimes as few as two.
Of course, if those manual exposure controls don’t matter to you, then you may also want to check out the Canon Powershot SD1000 or Sony Cyber-shot DSC-T20 mentioned earlier, since they’ll provide cleaner images at lower ISOs and are faster between shots. Of course, the SD1000 doesn’t include image stabilization and is 7.1MP, and though the T20 has optical image stabilization, it is an 8.1MP camera. Even if the megapixel count isn’t important to you, and it shouldn’t be, you should keep the Fujifilm F50fd on your short list.
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