Announced in March 2006, the 5.1-megapixel Fujifilm FinePix V10 is a digital camera with a unique gaming system. Four games come in the camera, along with six Scene modes and a Movie mode. It has a big 3-inch LCD screen and a 3.4x optical zoom lens. It had an initial retail price of $349.
The V10 looks better than most other FinePix digital cameras. Its sturdy 3.3 x 2.5 x 0.9-inch metal body is slim, square, and highlighted by chrome panels that frame the front and back. The back of the camera is an eye-pleaser, too. A 230,000-pixel, 3-inch LCD screen takes up much of the space. The cool design has its imperfections though. The enormous LCD screen leaves almost no room for control buttons. Thus, all the buttons are squashed in a horizontal row across the bottom of the camera; this makes handling a bit difficult.
A 3.4x optical zoom lens extends from the front of the Fujifilm FinePix V10. It doesn’t work while recording movies, which is unfortunate. Another sad point is the lack of image stabilization. To its credit, the Movie mode still records decent footage, as long as subjects aren’t standing in front of bright windows or otherwise backlit. The movie resolution is television-quality and the audio is decent.
Still pictures can be taken with the following Scene modes: Natural Light, Natural Light & With Flash, Portrait, Landscape, Sport, and Night. Many compact digital cameras offer more scene modes – the $299 Kodak V530 has 20 and the $349 Casio S600 has 34 – but the Fujifilm V10 is equipped with the basics. This model has a Program mode that lets you choose a white balance preset and an ISO setting from 64-1600 to keep pictures illuminated in dim places.
The Fujifilm FinePix V10 has four primitive games that will probably only impress people who don’t normally play them. Picture Puzzle scrambles an image and lets you reorganize it in Rubik’s cube fashion. The Maze game turns you into a chick searching desperately for your mother hen in a maze filled with strange white ghosts and little creatures that look like paper bags with red eyes. Block Buster involves bouncing a ball all over the screen to smash blocks and reveal an image underneath. The Shooting Game is an Atari-like space game that ends when the mother-ship blows you to smithereens. Unfortunately, the short 170-shot battery life isn’t very complementary to the gaming modes. The Sony T5's battery lasts 240 shots and the Fuji F10's lasts 500 shots, but neither of these cameras has gaming capabilities like the V10.
The Fujifilm FinePix V10 has some very impressive features. It can display images by date in the Playback mode, making it easy to find that lost photo from three months ago on your xD-Picture memory card. The flash on the V10 is quite powerful, but still fires evenly and doesn’t blow out subjects’ foreheads into white planes. Combined with the wide ISO range, the accurate colors, and the image sensor’s clean, noise-free performance, the Fuji V10 is a stellar package for $349. It’s perfect for taking portraits or shots for online auctions with its 3.5-inch Macro mode. And when you’re not snapping beautiful pictures or checking them out on the huge LCD screen, the video games will keep your kids from fighting on that long road trip.
