Fujifilm FinePix S8000fd review

Image quality
Image quality could also have been better and ends up about on par with the Olympus. While colours look accurate and the camera's automatic white balance does a fine job of serving up neutral colours in all sorts of lighting conditions, images are not as sharp as we would have liked.

We saw very little coloured fringing and even then only under the most extreme circumstances. In some cases, the camera tended to underexpose a little when using the Average metering mode, which uses the entire scene to determine exposure.

Noise is not the S8000fd's strong suit. We saw some noise even at the camera's lowest ISO setting of ISO 64, though you probably won't notice noise in prints until you reach ISO 200. Even then, artefacts should be minimal, and Fuji's noise-reduction algorithms don't degrade sharpness appreciably until ISO 400. However, prints should still be very usable at that sensitivity.

By ISO 800, images lose a lot of their sharpness, along with a noticeable amount of shadow detail. ISO 1,600 images become heavily blurred and have a very granular look with off-colour and white speckles covering the images.

Fuji includes ISO 3,200 and ISO 6,400 at a reduced resolution of 4 megapixels. This does help 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 800 when shooting with the S8000fd whenever possible and don't recommend shooting at ISO 1,600 or above at all.

Conclusion
If forced to choose between the S8000fd and the SP-550 UZ, we'd probably go with the Fuji, but only based on its faster performance. Of the trio of 18x zooms, the Panasonic DMC-FZ18 looks to be the best option, though it, too, has its problems.

Additional editing by Shannon Doubleday