CNET editors' review
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CNET editors' rating:
stars
Very good
Detailed editors' rating
- Reviewed on: 09/30/2003
- Released on: 08/15/2003
Editor's note: We have changed the rating in this review to reflect recent changes in our rating scale. Click here to find out more.
With a handsome, silver brushed-aluminum body and a fully retractable 3X zoom lens, the F700 is even lighter than its pocketable design suggests, at 6.7 ounces with battery and media installed. We found the camera easy to grip comfortably and securely, and it feels very solidly constructed. The controls generally operate crisply and precisely, although we found the four-way rocker switch a hair too small for our taste.
You can activate continuous autofocus or select an autofocus point with this button on the front of the camera.
Buttons distributed thoughtfully around the camera body do a good job of making the most frequently used features quickly accessible. Notable exceptions are the white-balance and light-sensitivity (ISO) controls, which you access via menus; however, we still found it relatively quick and easy to change these settings.
Continuous-shooting modes and autobracketing are conveniently accessible via this button on top of the camera.
You can select exposure and video modes via the mode dial, while you switch from shooting to playback with the power switch. Unfortunately, there's no quick-review button on the camera.
A more serious flaw is the fact that if you want to shoot RAW files instead of JPEGs, you have to venture into the nether regions of the Setup menu to select RAW mode. You should be able to switch to RAW and back in the same convenient menu where Fuji puts the JPEG resolution selections.
The lower two buttons let you adjust metering and exposure settings, while the button marked with an F activates a menu for selecting resolution, ISO, and color settings.
Controls to the right of the LCD let you change flash and macro settings, use exposure shift, navigate the menu system, and activate a grid overlay on the LCD to help with composition.
The F700 saves images on xD-Picture Card media.
You can capture JPEG images at four different resolutions, but there's only one fairly aggressive compression level. You can also record uncompressed CCD-RAW files, but the peculiar mathematics of the Super-CCD produces 13MB RAW files, which will eat up your xD-Picture Card pretty quickly. A very rudimentary program called Raw File Converter ships with the camera and will convert these RAW files to RGB TIFFs in your computer. The F700's impressive movie mode can capture 640x480-pixel (VGA) video with sound at 30 frames per second, and the length of video clips is limited only by the capacity of your media card.
The camera's 3X zoom lens covers the useful range of 35mm to 105mm in 35mm-camera terms. Its unremarkable maximum aperture of f/2.8 to f/4.9 is about average for this camera's class. Like its compact competitors, the F700 will not accept accessories such as supplemental lenses or external flashes. However, it outdoes much of the competition in the multimedia arena by doubling as a Webcam. Fuji provides a USB cradle that facilitates videoconferencing, as well as battery charging and image downloading.We were generally pleased with the F700's sprightly performance. Start-up time is slightly more than 2 seconds. Shutter delay, including autofocus time, is a very respectable 0.8 seconds; prefocusing cuts that delay to about 0.4 seconds. When shooting JPEGs, shot-to-shot time is essentially as fast as you can pull the somewhat mushy trigger at about 1 second--and we never experienced a buffer stall. To our mild disappointment, shot-to-shot time with RAW files is a longer 5 seconds. In standard continuous-shooting mode, the F700 takes a burst of five shots in 1 second, then pauses about 5 seconds to clear the buffer. The camera can also capture sequences of 1,280x960 images at five frames per second to the limit of your media card's capacity.
The F700's small, proprietary lithium-ion rechargeable battery gave us excellent life, lasting for about 250 shots in our tests.
The F700's flexible autofocus system operates quickly and decisively, and it includes a highly usable feature for selecting off-center autofocus target areas. It also works very well in low light, assisted by a selectable auxiliary light. There's also a continuously variable manual focus feature, but it doesn't magnify the center of the image, so we found it a bit difficult to judge proper focus on the LCD.
But that's not the fault of the excellent 1.8-inch LCD itself, which is sharp, colorful, and easy to use in bright outdoor light. It shows 100 percent of the actual image. The optical viewfinder, on the other hand, is tiny and somewhat distorted, and it shows only about 80 percent of the actual image. But at least it includes parallax correction marks to help you frame nearby subjects properly, an admirable but now dying tradition.
Fujifilm lists the range of the flash as a somewhat lackluster 16.4 feet at ISO 400 (equivalent to 8.4 feet in cameras that measure flash range at ISO 100).Fujifilm's Super-CCD SR is designed to maximize dynamic range, which is, roughly, the scope of brightness in a photo from the highlights to the darkest shadows where detail is still discernible in each. To do this, the Super-CCD SR uses two photosites per pixel location: one that is highly sensitive to light for recording shadows and midtones, and another that is less sensitive to light for recording highlights. In our tests, the F700's photos did indeed have significantly greater dynamic range--by as much as 2EV or 3EV--than we normally see from consumer digicams. This is an important benefit, and we hope and expect that Fujifilm will develop this technology further.
In other respects, the F700's images are less notable. Our flash and ambient exposures were generally good, and colors were vibrant and accurate. We also got pleasing skin tones in our people pictures. Sharpness and detail are reasonable but certainly not the best available from a high-quality 3-megapixel camera. We got slightly better detail from the camera's interpolated 6-megapixel files than we did from its 3-megapixel images.
Noise is low to moderate at the camera's minimum ISO setting of 200, and it's still fairly well controlled at ISO 400 and ISO 800. Even at ISO 1,600, images are not severely noisy, although resolution is limited to 1,280x960 at that sensitivity. Unfortunately, the aggressive image processing used to reduce noise levels smears fine, low-contrast detail and can leave splotchy patches. This is especially evident in images shot at more than ISO 200.
We did note worse than average purple fringing, and our JPEG images show moderate compression artifacts. You can avoid the latter and also reduce noise levels a bit by shooting RAW files, as long as you don't mind the extra postprocessing work and the greater storage capacity this format requires.
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"Nice camera, while it last...poor custoner servie & warranty!"
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