Fortunately my cousin was able to let me test out the Fuji Finepix F70EXR for a brief moment. I actually did not know the tech specs but here are some of the more notable ones from what I have researched:
- 1/2" CCD sensor
- 10 MP resolution
- 10x optical zoom
- wide angle to telephoto: 27-270mm (35mm equivalent)
- 2.7" LCD screen
- ISO up to 12800
- VGA video recording (640x480)
From what I could tell, the build quality was quite excellent. I believe it has a metal frame construction with some kind of thick paint or lacquer or something so the build was quite solid and would hold up to some mild abuse. The camera itself was also thin and small enough to fit inside your pockets (unlike my S50 brick).
For myself, image quality comes first and from what I could see there are certainly interesting features on this camera that help to improve image quality. Surely any P&S can easily do ISO 100 - 400 with minimal effort, however, with companies pushing higher MP count on smaller sensors, noise becomes pretty evident on anything higher than ISO 400 for most P&S. While 1/2" CCD sensor size certainly isn't the biggest I've heard of on a P&S it is still quite large compared to most P&S cameras out there, which definitely helps with the noise.
With that said, I think the low noise performance on the F70EXR was quite acceptable up to ISO 1600. I would definitely not use anything past ISO 1600 even though it claims to hit ISO 12800. Though certainly not glamorous at ISO 1600, the picture is still great and if only used for web applications (blogs, flickr, etc) then it is certainly more than acceptable when scaled down from 10 MP. I think that this might be the first P&S camera that I've handled that performs decent in low light situations.
The F70EXR also has some unique shooting functions called "PRO SHOT" and "PRO LOW LIGHT" I believe. PRO SHOT is a function where when the camera is focused on a certain object, say a cup of coffee in a coffee shop, it will add more "blur" to the background. Given that the maximum aperture is f/3.3 on the widest focal length, I guess this function helps to add to the "brokeh" that so many people love. I have not seen a blown up image to see how well the blur is, but the camera certainly does it in hardware since it does it on the spot. Another unique function I found out was the PRO LOW LIGHT, which I thought was more or less a HDR function on the camera. Basically it snaps a few pictures of the current scene and blends them together in hardware, similar to what photogs would be doing on their computers in Photoshop to create a HDR image. I have to say that it does indeed bring out more details and contrast in pictures, but I'll let a more dedicated reviewer with the images on hand do a more detailed examination.
Overall, the camera seems pretty solid after only brief moment of testing. It has good low light performance (relative to other P&S) and offers unique functions to make pictures more glamorous. For me 10MP is way more than enough and the 10x optical zoom is a plus. My only negative would be the lack of HD video recording that is found on basically all recent P&S cameras from other makes like Canon and Panasonic. Also I'm pretty sure that the image stabilization on the camera is imaged based rather than optical, which might be a concern as well.
Anyways, I will be looking forward to P&S camera shopping in Taiwan and hopefully I'll be able to pick something up to replace my aging and painfully slow Canon Powershot S50. The Fuji Finepix F70EXR is definitely on the list of possible buys, though I certainly want to look for something like the Canon SD780IS or possibly a Panasonic DMC-LX3 / ZS3, etc.
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