Designed by a sports car designer, the compact Fujifilm FinePix 6800 Zoom camera combines style with flexibility, good image quality, and point-and-shoot ease of use. Thanks to a wide range of photo features, video and audio capture, and Webcam capability, it will appeal to anyone with a weakness for sleek, versatile imaging gear. But advanced photographers will want to take a careful look at the trade-offs that Fujifilm's imaging technology makes, and budget buyers will have to keep dreaming.
The body's by Porsche, but the FinePix 6800 Zoom isn't a midlife-crisis car--it's an upscale digital camera from Fujifilm. Conceived with a little help from the sports car designer, this easy-to-use digicam offers style, solid image quality, and versatility without too much complexity. In keeping with the sports car theme, the 6800 Zoom is also a fast performer that will let you keep up with the action without missing the shots you want. Fujifilm built the camera around its innovative 3.3-megapixel SuperCCD, and it does a great job with dynamic range, image detail, and colour, but advanced photographers will want to give careful consideration to the trade-offs in increased image noise and occasional chromatic flaws.
Fujifilm's 3.3-megapixel SuperCCD image sensor has an innovative design, with octagonal pixels arranged in a honeycomb fashion.
According to the company, this kind of sensor and the image sampling and processing system created to work with it can capture images with higher resolution and more detail than a standard CCD of the same resolution can. Our test images showed an excellent dynamic range, and the 6800 Zoom was able to capture ample detail in both shadow and highlight areas. The camera produced vivid, well-balanced colours, although shots tended to be warm, especially indoors.
Unfortunately, we also noticed some flaws in the image quality, the most prevalent being visible noise. Even in brightly lit outdoor shots, areas that should have been smooth were sometimes mottled with visual noise. This effect was most pronounced in the camera's 6-megapixel mode. In tricky lighting situations that juxtaposed dark and bright areas, the 6800 Zoom also produced quite noticeable blooming and chromatic aberration, so that tree branches shot against a bright sky turned out looking turquoise and white objects were fringed with unrealistic colour.
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