Fujifilm FinePix S8000fd

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By Philip Ryan, CNET.com
Dec 03, 2007

One of the best reasons to consider a megazoom is the fact that you get a big zoom range in a small package, so you don't have to carry around huge SLR lenses and, more importantly, you don't have to pay the huge prices for those SLR lenses. Fujifilm's FinePix S8000fd sports an 18x optical zoom lens that covers a 35mm-equivalent range of 27mm-to-486mm with a maximum aperture range of F2.8-to-F4.5. Given that a lot of megazooms start around a not-so-wide 36mm with their zooms, this camera's lens should make group portraits or big landscapes easier to frame.

Design

With its well-sculpted, rubberized grip and another nicely contoured and rubberized area for your thumb, the S8000fd is more comfortable to hold than some megazooms. However, the F button, which leads you to the FinePix menu that lets you change ISO, image quality/size, and color mode settings, is located too close to where your thumb goes, and we accidentally pressed it a few times during our field tests.

Other than that, the buttons are placed well. The only button not on the right hand side of the camera is the flash button, which is logically placed on the left side of the flash itself.

For more details on the S800fd's design, click on the image.

Close scrutiny shows that the FinePix S8000fd has a lot in common with Olympus' SP-550UZ. Both use 1/2.35-inch CCD sensors that are a touch smaller than the 1/2.5-inch sensor in Panasonic's 18x megazoom Lumix DMC-FZ18.

Also, both have the same zoom range, since they have identically-spec'ed lenses, and both include sensor-shift image stabilization. Their bodies are very similar in layout, though the Olympus is a touch smaller and has a nice grip around the barrel of the lens, but its main grip isn't as nicely shaped as this Fuji's grip. The biggest difference between the two is that the SP550UZ is a 7.1-megapixel camera, while the S8000fd has an 8-megapixel CCD.

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