Fujifilm F810 review

Fujifilm’s F810 is a conventional still camera that can, thanks to SuperCCD technology, shoot movies at a resolution of 640×480 pixels and 30fps. Movie length is limited only by the capacity of the memory card, while stills can be shot at either 6-megapixels or  interpolated (guessed) 12-megapixels.

On the back, there’s a switch for Standard and Wide mode. In Standard mode there’s the usual digital camera 4:3 aspect ratio, but in Wide you get a 16:9 widescreen format. Admittedly, the Fujifilm does this simply by slicing strips off the top and bottom of the image, but it can still help you see a wider range of still photo compositions and shoot movies specifically for your widescreen TV.

There’s a serious level of photographic control with this camera, starting with a 4x optical zoom (which covers a wider angle than most), a full set of exposure modes, three different metering patterns, auto-exposure bracketing, the works.

Things are more primitive on the movie side. If you want night view modes, image stabilisers and long-range zooms, get a camcorder. But for quick and easy video snapshots, it’s great.

The movie quality isn’t bad at all, especially by the (usually low) standards of still cameras. The bad news is that the F810 saves movies in the AVI format, which uses lots of space and limits you to 10 minutes shooting, even with a 512MB xD-Picture Card (only 16MB comes with the camera).

Most importantly, still photo quality is – as we’ve come to expect from Fuji – superb.