FinePix S5000 digital camera

Review:
With several digital cameras we've tried over the years, they often felt bulky and heavy, and didn't have the feel of a camera. The FinePix S5000 is not like that. It has a great feel (we love the area to the right of the camera where there are two indentations to make your hand feel better) and is a lot lighter than several other digital cameras we've tried.

The 3.1 megapixel camera also has enough advanced photographer features to make them happy, yet the amount of features isn't so daunting that a brand new user gets intimidated. Once you learn how to take a photo, you can learn about the other features easily without feeling like you have to wade through a 100-page manual.

The great features on this camera include a pop-up flash, 10x optical zoom (plus 2.2x digital for 22x zoom total), and a great 1.5-inch TFT LCD monitor that gave us a great view of the images we snapped, even outdoors. Furthermore, the camera includes a great feature that let us focus on our subject, then move the image so that we weren't always taking dead-center photographs (the subject can be in the foreground and the background can be out of focus for a great looking shot). We also liked being able to easily switch between the resolutions on our photos, so we could decide to take a lot of photos for a Web site, or punch up the resolution for photos we knew we were going to print. With a lot of cameras switching resolutions is an exercise in menu manipulation; with the S5000 it was extremely easy.

Transferring the photos to a PC via the bundled software wasn't the greatest experience, we had better luck by just using the Windows XP applications for moving photos into our PC.

Reviewed by Keith Shaw