Review: Fujifilm Z3 digital camera

A stylish digital compact with excellent build quality

Available in light-blue and pink, the new Z3 from Fujifilm is clearly aimed primarily at the female market.

However, men – and women who don’t enjoy being stereotyped – will be pleased to hear it’s also available in silver.

The Z3's suitability for handbag storage goes beyond the benefits of its ultra-compact proportions.

The aluminium body features a sliding front cover to protect the lens and built-in flash, while to the rear the 2.5in LCD is coated with a scratch-resistant glass.

So, should you find yourself too lazy to pop it back in its handy suede-effect pouch, a journey spent in the intimate company of your house keys should see it emerge relatively unscathed.

However, with the lens tucked tightly into the postage-stamp corner, you’ll need to take care or you may find your fingers feature in your photos a little too frequently.

But the Z3 isn’t all about looks and convenience.

Using a sensibly specified 5 megapixel sensor, this camera strikes a good balance between CCD resolution, lens size and storage capacity. Its selection of useful shooting modes makes good use of the camera's capabilities without confusing you with gimmicks.

Being simple enough not to require a mode dial, the Z3 is very easy to use.

Opening the cover also turns on the power and the relatively small number of control buttons gives access to commonly used functions without the need to enter the menu system.

A switch next to the shutter release selects either stills or VGA-resolution movie mode, while macro, flash and self-timer functions are accessed from a four-way cursor control pad.

Although one of the shooting modes is called Manual, this simply means you can alter more of the camera settings, such as ISO mode – you don’t get full control over shutter speed and aperture.

These days, every digital camera has to have some sort of anti-blur system and the Z3 is no exception. While some high-end cameras come with mechanical optical stabilisation systems, the Z3 relies on the fact that it’s good at shooting in low light and sets itself up to exploit its high sensitivity.

This amounts to nothing more than automatically setting up the camera for a fast shutter speed with a high sensitivity. Any camera could do this, but only a camera as sensitive as the Z3 can do it with convincing results.

This mode is given its own dedicated button, so even the novice photographer will be able to take crisp indoor photos with ease, even when flash photography cannot be used.

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For the majority of owners of a camera like this, adding an ISO1600 mode to a digital camera isn’t enough to ensure good-quality photos.

While some image noise is certainly present when shooting at ISO1600 it still produces impressively clean images, which is more than can be said for many cameras – even when shooting at ISO800 or less.

If you zoom in close, you can see that some image processing has been used and it’s possible to achieve similar results with other cameras by using noise reduction filters on your PC.

But users of the Z3 probably won't want to go to such trouble and its in-camera processing creates good-looking pictures in low light that are ready for printing straight from the camera.

But in our testing we did notice that the Z3’s image processing affected shots in normal daylight conditions. In one shot a big patch of lush green grass lost its definition and was left looking like clumps of green moss.

For those users who don’t enjoy fiddling with ISO settings and shutter speeds in the middle of a party, Fujifilm has included a number of shooting modes designed specifically to leverage the high sensitivity of the camera while hiding away the technicalities.

In-camera flash is generally pretty poor, especially for a camera of this size. In general you’ll get far better pictures if you can shoot without flash, and this is where a sensitive camera comes into its own.

Natural light mode helps you obtain true-to-life images by disabling the flash. Unfortunately, camera shake and motion blur can still make shooting without flash a little risky.

Fujifilm’s new Natural light + flash mode addresses this by taking two shots in rapid succession; the first using available light and the second with flash. This gives you two shots to choose from when you review your photos later.

The camera battery is recharged by the included docking cradle, which must be used to transfer photos to your PC via USB.

Then you can use the supplied FinePix Viewer and ImageMixer VCD LE software to perform basic image enhancement, make prints or create CD-based slideshows or Video discs.

The Fujifilm Z3 is an excellent blend of design and performance for the casual photographer who wants good quality photos without having to think too much – and who isn’t obsessed with megapixels and obscure functions.

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