One of the best reasons to consider a megazoom is the fact that you geta big zoom range in a small package, so you don't have to carry aroundhuge dSLR lenses and, more importantly, you don't have to pay the hugeprices for those dSLR lenses.
Fujifilm FinePix S8000fd
The Good
The Bad
The Bottom Line
For around £180, Fujifilm's FinePix S8000fd sports an 18xoptical zoom lens that covers a 35mm-equivalent range of 27mm-to-486mmwith a maximum aperture range of f/2.8-to-f/4.5. Given that a lot ofmegazooms start around a not-so-wide 36mm with their zooms, thiscamera's lens should make group portraits or big landscapes easier toframe.
Design
With its well-sculpted, rubberised grip and another nicelycontoured and rubberised area for your thumb, the S8000fd is morecomfortable to hold than some megazooms.
However, the F button, whichleads you to the FinePix menu that lets you change ISO, imagequality/size and colour mode settings, is located too close to whereyour thumb goes, and we accidentally pressed it a few times during our tests. Other than that, the buttons are placed well. The onlybutton 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.
Close scrutiny shows that the FinePix S8000fd has a lot in common with Olympus' SP-550 UZ. 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 DMC-FZ18.Also, both have the same zoom range, since they haveidentically-spec'ed lenses, and both include sensor-shift imagestabilisation.
Their bodies are very similar in layout, though theOlympus is a touch smaller and has a nice grip around the barrel of thelens, but its main grip isn't as nicely shaped as this Fuji's grip. Thebiggest difference between the two is that the SP-550 UZ is a7.1-megapixel camera, while the S8000fd has an 8-megapixel CCD.
Features
The S8000fd includes most of the features you'd expect to find in amegazoom. The two biggest omissions are a hotshoe and raw capture. Asmentioned above, the S8000fd includes sensor-shift image stabilisationin contrast to the DMC-FZ18's optical image stabilisation. Whilesensor-shift IS has a reputation of being inferior to optical IS, we gotimpressive results from the S8000fd.
In our tests, we were able tocapture a sharp image shooting at 1/150th of a second and the lens zoomed allthe way to its 486mm limit. Without image stabilisation, we would havehad to shoot at 1/500th of a second to get those results. Fuji also includesan ISO-boost mode that they also refer to as an IS mode. However, asalways, higher ISOs bring with them more noise and less sharpness.
As has become the trend, the S8000fd includes face detection,but this camera uses Fuji's original algorithms rather than the newersystem incorporated into its little sister, the FinePix F50fd.Still, it does a good job of finding faces in your shots and tends tolose track of the faces if it can't find both eyes, while the newerversion can find faces even if they are in profile. Once the camerafinds the faces, it uses them to help determine focus and exposure sothe camera won't make a mistake and focus on something in thebackground instead of your mum's lovely smile.
Control freaks will appreciate the S8000fd's manual exposure controls,which give you up to 10 choices for apertures spanning f/2.8 throughf/8 and 40 shutter speeds ranging from 4 seconds to 1/2000 second. Theinterface for those controls could be better, though.
Rather thanincluding any thumb or finger wheels, you have to press the exposurecompensation button and then use the control pad to set aperture and/orshutter speed. One, or even better two, wheels would make the process alot smoother of an experience. Still, it's nice to see manual exposurecontrols with this many choices, since some only include two or threechoices for apertures.
Performance
While not as slow between shots as the Olympus SP-550 UZ, theS8000fd is far from a speed demon and can't even nearly keep up withthe SP-550 UZ's burst rate. The camera took 3.1 seconds to start up andcapture its first JPEG. Subsequent JPEGs took 2.6 seconds between shotswith the flash turned off and 2.9 seconds with the flash turned on.
(Smaller bars indicate better performance )
 | Typical shot-to-shot time | | Time to first shot | | Shutter lag (dim) | | Shutter lag (typical) |
(Longer bars indicate better performance)
Shutter lag proved slightly sluggish, measuring 0.8 seconds in our highcontrast test and 2 seconds in our low contrast test, which mimicbright and dim shooting conditions, respectively. In our continuousshooting test, we were able to capture 8.1-megapixel images at a dismalaverage rate of 0.5 frames per second.
Image quality
Image quality could also have been better and ends up about on par withthe Olympus. While colours look accurate and the camera's automaticwhite balance does a fine job of serving up neutral colours in all sortsof lighting conditions, images are not as sharp as we would have liked.
We saw very little coloured fringing and even then only under the mostextreme circumstances. In some cases, the camera tended to underexposea little when using the Average metering mode, which uses the entirescene to determine exposure.
Noise is not the S8000fd's strong suit. We saw some noise evenat the camera's lowest ISO setting of ISO 64, though you probably won'tnotice noise in prints until you reach ISO 200. Even then, artefactsshould be minimal, and Fuji's noise-reduction algorithms don't degradesharpness appreciably until ISO 400. However, prints should still bevery usable at that sensitivity.
By ISO 800, images lose a lot of theirsharpness, along with a noticeable amount of shadow detail. ISO 1,600images become heavily blurred and have a very granular look withoff-colour and white speckles covering the images.
Fuji includes ISO3,200 and ISO 6,400 at a reduced resolution of 4 megapixels. This doeshelp keep noise from becoming much worse than it is at ISO 1,600.However, we didn't see any advantage, either. We'd stay below ISO 800when shooting with the S8000fd whenever possible and don't recommendshooting at ISO 1,600 or above at all.
Conclusion
If forced to choose between the S8000fd andthe SP-550 UZ, we'd probably go with the Fuji, but only based on itsfaster performance. Of the trio of 18x zooms, the Panasonic DMC-FZ18
Additional editing by Shannon Doubleday