Fujifilm FinePix 2600 Zoom

After having become addicted to playing with the digital camera at work, I decided that I wanted to own a digital camera that would give stunning picture quality. I was prepared to spend around £200. This was a few months ago, before I had discovered Dooyoo or Ciao, and I was struggling to find any independent advice on the internet. Consumer-reviews.co.uk was a fat lot of good. I therefore embarked upon the route of trial and error, with the help ...
.../> Initially I bought a Fuji A201. I was very unhappy with the image quality so I exchanged it for a Kodak DX3215 which was too bulky and also gave grainy picture quality. Once again I exchanged it (Argos are kind people you know), this time for the Fuji Finepix 2600 Zoom. Third time lucky. This was back in March 2002 and I paid £240 - the catalogue price was £300 but Argos were offering an amazing 20% off all digital cameras. If you missed this ... more

After having become addicted to playing with the digital camera at work, I decided that I wanted to own a digital camera that would give stunning picture quality. I was prepared to spend around £200. This was a few months ago, before I had discovered Dooyoo or Ciao, and I was struggling to find any independent advice on the internet. Consumer-reviews.co.uk was a fat lot of good. I therefore embarked upon the route of trial and error, with the help of Argos's good old 16 day guarantee.

Initially I bought a Fuji A201. I was very unhappy with the image quality so I exchanged it for a Kodak DX3215 which was too bulky and also gave grainy picture quality. Once again I exchanged it (Argos are kind people you know), this time for the Fuji Finepix 2600 Zoom. Third time lucky. This was back in March 2002 and I paid £240 - the catalogue price was £300 but Argos were offering an amazing 20% off all digital cameras. If you missed this offer don't be too downhearted because digital camera prices in general are always falling.

The 2600 is a decidedly attractive, ergonomic little camera. Finished in a brushed silver effect, it looks expensive and stylish, and is small enough to fit in your hand or dangle around your wrist without being cumbersome. To take pictures you must first slide the lens cover to one side and turn the power on. The zoom lens immediately pops its head out with a satisfying "whirring" sound. Photographs can be taken simply by using the 1.8 inch LCD screen for a live preview, although it is sometimes hard to see the image on the screen in conditions of extreme light or dark. Since the LCD screen places a great strain on the battery, it makes more sense to take pictures through the viewfinder as you would with a normal camera.

After taking a picture it is easy and extremely satisfying to review the photograph on the LCD screen. Any duff pictures can immediately be deleted. The ability to instantly look at your pictures is a great feature, which is made easier by the multi-frame playback which displays nine thumbnail pictures on the screen for quick reference.

The 3x optical zoom on the 2600 is controlled by an easy-to-use rocker switch. (In addition to the optical zoom, the 2600 has a 2.5x digital zoom which I will explain more about in the paragraph below.) According to Fuji, the 3x optical Fujinon zoom lens on the 2600 is comparable to a 38-114mm range on a 35mm camera, which I think is highly impressive for a digital camera in this price range. But the proof of the pudding is in the tasting, and I was absolutely blown away when I saw the quality of the pictures I had taken with this camera. The images are consistently pin-sharp and the colour is vibrant. I could spend all day hunting for adjectives to sing this camera's praises, but quite simply these photographs are in the same league as anything taken on a professional camera costing three times as much. Provided that you have a basic knowledge of how to take a good picture, the results delivered by this camera will never cease to delight you. Even in dark conditions, the built-in flash provides exactly the right level of light to give the perfect shot, with the automatic red-eye reduction working a treat. On many other digital cameras I have found that pixelation occurs in dark areas of the image, but the 2600 contains the very latest technology which intelligently adjusts to the lighting conditions to avoid this problem happening.

(A little note about optical zoom versus digital zoom: there is an important difference between these two functions. Optical zoom is the traditional type of zoom which relies upon a magnifying lens - the same principle as a telescope. Digital zoom, however, is a bit of a con even though it sounds impressive. Digital zoom is performed by the camera's internal software, and works retrospectively by cropping in to an area of the original picture, then scaling up that area in size. However, it does not restore the same level of picture quality into the chosen area. Digital zoom is exactly the same as the effect you can achieve with an everyday piece of photo editing software by cropping the image and then enlarging it. You will notice that the quality suffers if you enlarge a small area. Virtually all cheap digital cameras now offer digital zoom but don't be too impressed by what is really a meaningless feature. If you want the ability to zoom in without losing quality then optical zoom is the only real answer.)

Pictures taken on the 2600 are superb when viewed on a computer screen, and equally good when printed out in colour. Although the quality of print will be governed by the type of printer used, I have printed out some shots onto a professional digital proofing machine at work, and the results look exactly like high quality conventional photographs. For special occasions you could pay a developing service to have your digital photographs printed out in this way.

After having taken some superb pictures on this camera, I studied the manual in greater depth and found out that I hadn't even been using the high resolution mode! Unbeknown to me I had been taking pictures in 'normal' mode (1 million pixels) per shot, but the camera was actually capable of delivering double this resolution. I still haven't felt the need to use high resolution mode, as the normal results are more than good enough. But the 2 million pixel mode would be fantastic to use for special occasions where quality is of the essence. A typical high resolution shot taken will give a quality print at A5 size. Digital cameras which boast a resolution of 2 million pixels are fairly mid-table nowadays, but just a few years ago would have been the stuff of a madman's dreams.

The Fuji 2600 is supplied with a 3.3v 16 megabyte SmartMedia card which is a more modern piece of data storage than the Compact Flash cards sold with other brands of camera. I had an extraordinary stroke of luck when I bought my 2600, as there was a 64 megabyte SmartMedia card included in the box. According to the literature, and the Argos catalogue, you're only supposed to get a 16mb card. Maybe someone at the Fuji factory was feeling generous when they packed my camera!

The SmartMedia card is wafer-thin and scarcely any bigger than a postage stamp. Cards can be taken out and swapped between different cameras, whilst retaining the pictures held on them.

Working on the assumption that you have the 16mb SmartMedia card supplied with this camera, you can store the following number of shots:

2 million pixel mode
20 at 'Fine' quality -or- 39 at 'Normal' quality -or- 75 at 'Basic' quality

1 million pixel mode
25 at 'Fine' quality -or- 49 at 'Normal' quality

VGA resolution (ideal for photos intended to be sent as e-mail attachments)
122 at 'Normal' quality

A counter on the LCD screen tells you how many available shots are left depending on what mode is selected. Additional SmartMedia cards can be bought in a variety of memory sizes if you wish to take lots of pictures on holiday, for example. If you invest in a 128mb SmartMedia card you will be able to store as many as 398 pictures in 1 million pixel mode - pretty impressive!

The camera's interface takes a few minutes to get the hang of, but is quite self explanatory to use. The menu is viewed on the LCD and is easy to navigate with the usual up/down/left/right system similar to that found on mobile phones. Serious photographers will appreciate the various flash modes, close up macro mode, adjustable white balance and exposure compensation (don't ask me what any of those mean), although there is nothing wrong with putting this camera into Auto mode and letting the internal processor do all the worrying.

Perhaps the most enjoyable part of digital photography is downloading the fruits of your labour onto your computer. The 2600 makes this process beautifully simple. Using the supplied cable, you plug one end into the camera and the other end into the USB port on your computer. Within a couple of seconds, a folder containing the photos pops up on your screen. It's really that easy. If your computer doesn't have a USB port then you need to buy a SmartMedia card reader which does make the process more tiresome.

Many other digital cameras, like the entire Kodak range for example, use a so-called docking station for download purposes which I think is an unnecessary bit of clutter that sits next to your computer and looks like a model of the Starship Enterprise. Admittedly it doubles up as a battery charger but I prefer the simple approach that Fuji have taken here.

For more advanced photo management, Fuji kindly supply a CD ROM with the camera which contains all the software you could ever possibly need. I haven't explored this software in any depth, as I prefer to use Adobe Photoshop, but a quick glance at the software manual tells me that I can edit movie files, use the camera as a webcam or e-mail my pictures to Fuji's printing service. I have tried the slideshow feature which I think is an excellent way of filing and viewing your photographs. I'm also pleased to note that Fuji made the software Apple Mac compatible.

The self timer is another feature which offers great fun and convenience, particularly if there are only two of you on holiday. There is also an inbuilt clock which places an invisible date/time stamp on each picture. When the shots are transferred to your computer - hey presto - the file information tells you exactly what date and time the shot was taken at.

Unlike many digital cameras the Fuji 2600 comes with two rechargeable AA size batteries and they've even thrown in a free battery charger which is compact and easy to use. One set of fully recharged batteries proved sufficient to last for a fortnight on my recent holiday in Florida, and I took about 120 pictures during this time. Battery life will generally be reduced if you make heavy use of the LCD screen, but if you keep the screen turned off and pretend that this is a normal camera, the batteries will do you proud. If you are taking this camera on a long holiday, I would suggest buying another pair of rechargeable AA batteries and taking the charger away with you so that you are never caught short when the low-power warning light starts to flash.

I haven't even begun to talk about this camera's ability to take movie footage. Well, it's actually very limited in this department as firstly you don't get any sound on your movie clips, and secondly the camera can only handle a maximum movie length of 20 seconds, regardless of the size of your SmartMedia card.

I've tried taking movie footage once and it can be quite good fun to record a little mpg file to send to your friends, but that's all it is - fun. If you saw this camera advertised and thought "wow, it's also a camcorder", you can forget it. The movie feature is crude and should only been seen as an extra and not a core feature of this camera.

Overall this camera is an adorable little gem. It's been designed by people who really know and care about photography. True, it may be a lot of money to spend on a camera, but if you are still using a conventional film camera it is interesting to consider that a good quality digital camera will soon pay for itself with the saving you are making on films and developing. In fact this camera could pay for itself after you have taken a couple of hundred pictures. Add to this the obvious benefit of not having to pay Truprint to develop pictures of a large finger over the lens or Uncle Derek with half his head chopped off. You know where I'm coming from.

If I was pushed to find any criticism of this camera, I'd say that Fuji could have been a tiny bit more generous and thrown in a camera case. As criticisms go, that's rather a pathetic one but I'm doing my best to be objective here! However, my camera survived a good battering during my tour of theme parks and beaches in Florida, so it appears to be robustly built.

(NB. When I was in America I saw this model on sale for $300, which is approximately £200, so it seems that sadly us Brits are still having to pay more for the same products, although our higher level of VAT would account for a large part of the price difference.)

If you feel tempted by this camera, but would still like to judge it for yourself, then I would strongly recommend buying it from Argos and trying it out. If you're not happy you can take it back under their 16 day guarantee and either change it for a different model, or get a full refund. Provided the camera is still in mint condition, they will honour their guarantee without quibble.

I will summarise with a tenuous and slightly embarrassing play on words:

There aren't any negatives with this camera (ahem).

I'll get my coat. 

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