I have been involved in photography for quite some time, always using film as my medium of choice, and I was very happy to receive a Fuji Finepix 2800 zoom from my wife as a present for my birthday.This was my first foray into digital imaging, and I was looking forward to "instant" quality photo's.
The camera itself is very small, and Fuji have designed it to look like a small SLR camera, also containing a small built-in flash.The flash itself has enough modes for most uses, but is, in all honestly, a little feeble.In poor light it employs infra-red focusing, the same as the camera itself.
The 2800 focuses well enough in good light, but is very slow in poor lighting conditions, and sometimes can't find focus at all.The main selling point of this camera is the zoom range
of the lens as it has a 6 times optical and 2.5 digital zoom range, which is quite phenominal.The zoom range is equivalent to 38-228mm on a 35mm camera, and such lenses don't exist! Excellent for all photo's from portraits to landscapes, and everything in between.
The 2800 uses a SmartMedia card for its storage media, and is supplied with a 16mb card as standard. Dependent on the quality chosen this will give you the following quantity of pics: Fine mode 20, normal mode 39, and basic mode 75. If this is not enough you can purchase upgraded cards, right up to 128mb which will give you 319 pics in normal mode.
Quality of prints is good in fine mode, giving a very respectable photo at A4 size.The Fuji employs 2.0 million effective pixels and a 1/2.7 CCD. respectable, but by no means the best. For those of you who don't understand these terms,basically the higher the number of pixels, the higher the quality of print you get.
Fuji's Fujinon lens focuse from 80cm to infinity in auto mode, and 10 to 80cm in macro, or close-up mode.Again, this is a good range, the macro being a very useful feature.The flash is useful up to 3.5 metres, and this isn't so good.
You have a choice of 2 viewing methods, either through the standard viewfinder, or by using the 1.8" colour LCD monitor on the rear of the camera.In bright light the LCD screen is useless, even after tweeking the contrast,and I find it very awkard to use and much prefer the viewfinder.
The LCD panel is, however, of use when you are viewing the menu. This controls all of the camera's functions, and is straight-forward to use.
Power is supplied by 4 AA type batteries,or an optional AC adapter.This camera eats batteries, and I use re-chargable Nic Cad ones which last longer that conventional ones.
Other features of the 2800 are limited video capture, 1 minute with a 16mb card. The quality is very poor,and useless to me as a photographer.Also included is voice captioning, maybe of use if you can't remember what you've taken a picture of?A more useful feature is the ability to use the camera as a web-cam.
To download the images you simply connect the 2800 to your PC's USB port and follow the instructions on screen.To get the most out of the camera you really need some sort of photo software, I use Corel Photo House,and then you can really have some fun with altering your images.
It is worth mentioning that to get the best results you must have a photo quality printer, I use an Epson which gives good results, and if you are printing at best quality a fair amount of ink is used, and this can get quite expensive.
When my wife bought my 2800 it cost £299, pretty good value, but it can now be bought for £199, at which price it is excellent value.
As for as quality goes digital imaging is a long way behind film, and generally speaking the cameras are a lot less well specified. I would have liked to see some of the basic features improved, such as the flash range and focussing ability, and the ability to control exposure accurately, rather than relying totally on the camera's brain, although exposure is usually quite accurate.Some features could have been improved by cutting useless things like video and voice capture, but maybe I'm missing the point.
As a point and shoot camera giving almost instant results the 2800 is fine, but as a serious photographic tool it falls down badly,but I'll always carry it with me just in case I need an instant record.
How helpful would this review be to a person making a buying decision? Rating guidelines
Advantages: upto 570mm zoom, movie mode, macro, a complete photography solution in one package Disadvantages: slow to focus and shoot, no manual focus, advertising in software, registration terms and conditions
Apr 7th, 2003
very helpful by (79%):
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