Fujifilm FinePix S6500fd

Features
The S6500fd is Fujifilm's first camera featuring the Face Detection technology and the company has spared no effort in making it known by placing a dedicated button near the electronic viewfinder. When switched on, the camera automatically recognizes human faces in the scene and adjusts exposure and focus accordingly; ensuring human subjects in the pictures are properly exposed. This is especially useful for group shots or when taking posed pictures of people under tricky lighting conditions. The intelligent flash system, which was first introduced on the compact FinePix F30, is also available on the S6500fd.

Given that the Face Detection technology is still relatively new, there's definitely room for improvement. It is still not able to recognize faces accurately, in many cases picking up the faces only when subjects keep still and look at the camera straight on, thus rendering the technology useless when trying to capture candid pictures or fleeting emotions.

This camera is also able to handle high-sensitivity settings with ease (up to ISO 3,200), making it useful for indoor and night shots sans flash. Instead of incorporating an optical image stabilizer which helps to correct camera shake but not subject movement, Fujifilm touts its high ISO feature as Picture Stabilization which has the double effect of reducing blur by camera shake and subject movement at the same time.

In Program, Aperture- and Shutter-priority shooting modes, you can set the shutter speed between 1/4,000 and 4 seconds. Switch the camera into full manual and you can increase the speed to a maximum of 30 seconds. So depending on what you are shooting, you may have to go full manual if you wish to expose the sensor beyond 4 seconds.

Hands up if you usually end up taking two shots of the same scene, one with flash and one without, just so you know which will give you a better picture. Now you can shave off a few seconds with the dual shot mode on the S6500fd. This option takes two consecutive frames, one with flash and one without, and places them side-by-side so you can choose which to save immediately.

Under the photo mode function is a menu that lets you adjust picture mode settings, with three options to pick from: Standard, chrome, and black-and-white. In chrome color setting, picture saturation and contrast are increased, but we feel it's a little overboard and perhaps best left for landscape or architectural shots.

What the camera lacks in photo modes, it makes up for in its movie function which records at VGA resolution at 30 frames per second. What's even better is the manual zoom ring offers smooth, noiseless optical zoom when recording videos.

One useful frill of this camera is the option to attach a voice memo to pictures, making it easy to caption photos without the need for pen and paper. This will allow users to concentrate on taking pictures rather than worry about remembering the names of people in the picture or where the snap was taken when traveling.

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