Touted as the “ultimate” F series digital compact camera by its makers and marketers, Fujifilm’s FinePix F100fd (S$599) was created to meet the escalating demands of the point-and-shoot horde.

Armed with a 12-megapixel CCD image sensor, Real Photo (RP) III image processor, 5x optical zoom (28-140mm equivalent of 35mm) lens and a sharp 2.7-inch liquid crystal display, the F100fd packs plenty of digital and optical ammunition into its sleek metallic body.

Although not as thin as several of its anorexic competitors, the camera is just the right size for my palm and fits just about any pocket.

And despite the absence of a visible handgrip, my fingers wrap around the camera like a glove, with all the well-placed buttons in close proximity for easy access.

Following what seems to be a growing industry trend, the four-way directional pad of its predecessors has made way for a dial wheel here, allowing settings to be changed quickly on the menu interface.

Still, there is a minor quirk — the built-in flash, which normally sits on the top right edge of the camera, has been moved to the left. So, if you are not careful, your fingers might block the flash.

But why would you need a flash when this camera can go up to an amazing high ISO setting of 12,800 (3-megapixel only) and boasts face-detection technology?

However, the ISO 12,800 appears to be more a marketing gimmick than a real photographic advantage as the image is not usable. The camera’s face-detection feature is no publicity stunt though — it captures profiles, which other cameras usually fail to detect, with ease.

Its noise performance is by far the best I have seen in a compact digital camera. I would not hesitate to shoot at ISO 800 as the images are devoid of any noise. You only start to see traces of noise artifacts at ISO 1,600.

Even then, it is still usable, but I wouldn’t recommend ISO settings higher than that.

The image quality is top-notch. With its accurate auto-white balance, colours are reproduced vividly with nice contrast.

Details of shadow areas and highlights are well-picked-up by the dynamic range of the F100fd.

That said, it might be prudent to set the dynamic range at 100 per cent, instead of the maximum 400 per cent as it might create visible noise in the shadow areas.

I am not a big fan of scene modes as they never do their jobs properly. But after fiddling with the scene modes in the F100fd, I was surprised to find that most of them really work!

I particularly love the Portrait Enhancer mode that makes skin on pictures appear much smoother than in reality.

The Night mode captures night scenes with fantastic results, but please use a tripod as it usually involves long exposures.

Camera operation is lively, with minimal shutter lag and quick auto-focusing. However, startup is a tad slow at 2.3 seconds, while shutdown takes 1.6 seconds.

And while the 28-mm wide-angle lens is great, there is some barrel distortion that inflates the image around its sides.

With only about 57MB of internal memory, you might want to invest in an xD/SD/ SDHC memory card of at least 1GB to fully harness the potential of the camera.

VERDICT

With its superb image quality and noise performance, coupled with useful scene modes and a great optical range, the FinePix F100fd is by far the most well-balanced and proficient point-and-shoot digital compact camera in the market. - TODAY/sh