Fujifilm FinePix S5700

I got one of these as a present for xmas. It's fantastic.

As soon as the package arrives you can't for the life of you believe that it is sold at that price.

Everything about the camera really dose ooze quality for how much you pay for one. A nice matte plastic covers the entire camera, with a soft rubber grip for your shooting hand.

Everything seems to be in the right place on this camera. Lots of people have complained about the On/Off button being in an awkard place but I really really don't see any problem with it. It's a little slide switch located just behind the shoot button, you can't possibly catch it or nudge it as it's in it's own little recess.

The picture quality is second to none, and digital zoom isn't all that noisy (As in those little speckles of colour). The optical zoom runs very smooth, quiet, with no juddering at all and set on auto-focus, it automatically makes the image on the built in 2.5" screen crystal clear and you just know the image your going to take is going to be perfect.

The menus are easy to use. There are a number of buttons on the back of the camera for all sorts of settings and also a round selecting wheel on top of the camera for specific functions. That wheel has 11 pre set functions, which can then be altered using the menu buttons on the back of the camera. There are so many options in SP mode, Night, Portrait, Landscape, Fireworks, Sport, Sunset, Snow, Beach, Museum, Party, Flower and text.

The text mode and Super-Macro mode work beautifully giving you crisp, crystal clear images that are near perfect. I sat at one side of my living room, and using text mode with digital zoom I was able to take a picture of the back of a book and read all the tiny text in superb clarity.

On a decent monitor pictures look absolutely amazing, and with a decent photo printer too...you'll be a right little david bailey in no time! Colours, Sharpness (and softness in the right setting) can make your images look professional with a very little amount of effort to work out what settings you want.

Everything is adjustable, Aperture,Shutter Speed, Focus etc, of course you could just set it to auto and let it do everything itself. You get all the functionality of a full SLR camera packed into a semi-automatic standard digital camera.

This camera is a perfect inbetweeny standard digi-cam and SLR. It's a great mid point camera for those who want advanced features with a simple to use camera.

Battery Life, is amazing, I can't fault it. I had taken 200 odd pictures before the batteries died on me. My old olympus couldn't manage 30 pictures! This camera runs off of 4 AA batteries and the enrgizer ones you get with it last for ages.

Connecting to a PC couldn't be easier to be honest. You already have the option of connecting it to your PC via a usb cable and by using the Fuji software you get ona cd with the camera. The camera also takes standard sized SD cards, so you could have memory of upto 8GB at the moment which is just purely insane! Ofcourse using a memory card means you could just take it out of the camera and put it into a card read on your PC or Printer.

I can't recommend this enough. There is nothing about this particular camera that I would change. It's perfect as it is and at this price is a complete steal.

Hope I've helped convince a few people to buy this as it's worth it!