Fuji Finepix A330

Fuji Finepix A330 is a great little camera easy to use good value to start off with.

i now have a cracked back screen so trying to find if it is worth repairing.

as i use it all the time taking pics of the kids. so i miss it.

The Fuji Finepix A330 takes beautiful pictures in all types of conditions

THE INTRO OR THE OUTTRO?

It was with no apparent intention to buy the Fuji Finepix A330 digital camera, that the Coolster thumbed his way through his ex wife's 'Bigtree's' autumn/winter 2004 Catalogue (note: That's a not so cryptic, cryptic clue as to the real name, guesses in comments please). Normally the digital camera section featured vastly overpriced cameras, and only recently had it been possible for one to buy a 2 Megapixel camera for under £100, and no optical zoomed model was even close in price. Besides, the Coolster had just been given a 2 Megapixel Digital Ixus by his friend, and was within 2 weeks of paying of for a Fuji Finepix A205s at his local Cashie G's store. True, the Canon's LCD screen was smashed to bits (though the screen's outer clear plastic cover to protect the user if the inner Glass screen did break was intact - the break was inevitable it seems, why else would Canon put a plastic cover on it)? yet it was still usable, even if it did make your skin itch if you put the viewfinder too close to it. The Fuji, by contrast, was also only 2 Megapixels, and it would have been nice to have the extra pixel power a 3 or 4 Megapixel model afforded. Afforded was the right word, being on the old 'Nat King' (Mockney Rhyming Slang) meant that going out and buying the ideal camera off the shelf was impossible. £55 and a bit ill octopuses (squids to you and me) a week doesn't go far when you've food, gas, electricity, phone, TV, and water rates to pay. (Hang about, hasn't the Coolster forgotten something? Oh yes, his Internet).

'They'll want at least £200 for a branded 3MP camera with optical Zoom' he thought to himself as he searched the index to find out what page the cameras were on, having no intention of actually buying one. What with having a Jenoptik (see his cracking review), a Canon with a US Screen, and a Finepix A205s on the way as well (almost sounds as if the Coolster's expecting a baby doesn't it?), the 'Cool's camera family was large enough. But Callan hadn't bargained on this seasons low prices. Flicking through to page 1052 where the camera section is, the very first camera in the section he noticed was a bargain 3MP Fuji for a quid short of a ton (£100 to you missus), but with no optical zoom. 'Considering it's a Fuji and in a catalogue, it's an excellent price for a 3MP model. There were 2MP Goodmans for £70, Fuji's for £90, and 3MP Kodak's for £110 (alas no optical zoom).

The first camera to make him take notice was a 4MP Concord for 90 purplies (£180 - 90 purple £20 notes), that was in the 'Our Gus' (Argos) catalogue shop for £150 on one of those dubious £100 off offers, whereby only a few stores charged the higher price (namely the 'Extra' stores with extra stock similar to the old ' Our Gus Superstores', and introduced into all stores at the lower price to fool buyers there really was a ton off it). He was sorely tempted, but his budget couldn't stretch to a fourth camera, no matter how many MP's it had, or how cheap it was. 103 weeks at £2.19. Callan could afford that, but he'd be paying interest. The next camera he considered was a 3MP Goodmans for £130, which was identical to a now defunct 2MP Minolta camera (though they still made the 2MP version), and a 3MP Kodak for the same price as the Concord. But, there was interest over 103 weeks, and his limit was about £3.00 a week.

Then he spotted two more Fuji's, the 3MP A330 at £150, and the 4MP A340 at £200. If it had been 5MP for that price there'd have been no contest'. He knew he wanted one of the cameras from the catalogue, but which one? And what would he do with 4 cameras? He'd been trying to sell his beloved Jenoptik for a few weeks with no success. He decided to ask Cashie G's if he could transfer his balance to buy other goods, and if so, buy a camera from 'Bigtree's'. However, if he couldn't, or he'd loose his deposit, he'd pass on the offer. Luckily, Cahsie G's reluctantly agreed, and at 5PM on the Tuesday, Cool's ex wife duly ordered the camera, which would be delivered that Thursday afternoon. '48 hours free delivery is excellent' he chuckled to himself. But which one was it? Was it the Concord, the Goodmans, the Kodak, or one of the Fuji's.

DELI 2 GO? NOT FOR FOUR DAYS!

Thursday afternoon came and went. The next day, at his insistence, Callan's ex rang 'Bigtree's' up to discover the lack of delivery was due to the wrong postcode being given over the phone (what's wrong with a map?). Callan thought that the drivers should have A-Z books to sort mishaps like this out. The woman on the phone kindly rung back to inform that the delivery time would be sometime on Monday. Monday came, and went again. Thankfully the camera came too, at about 9.45AM, which meant no waiting around all day.

IN ME 'ANDS ME OL' SON!

Callan excitedly tore open the blue polythene around the package to reveal a plain brown oblong box with no mention of the camera name on it, which he thought odd. Upon opening this box, the delivery advice note was there, as well as the camera's box, and a protective small polythene pillow to cushion the camera in transit. 'That's clever of Bigtree's' he mused. He gently opened the camera box and carefully slid the camera out, a shiny new FUJI FINEPIX A330. It was only £149.00 which wasn't bad. Callan thought it was worth the extra for a branded camera as he was really pleased with his Canon. Boots were charging the same price for it, and as it was only £2.88 a week over 52 interest free weeks it was a bargain. True, some online stores such as 24/7 shop and Pixmania were selling it as cheap as £100.00, but Callan couldn't afford to buy outright. 'For those with credit cards, That's an unbeatable offer' he gleefully thought.

WHAT'S ON THE BOARD MISS FORD? SORRY, WHAT'S IN THE BOX MISS FOX?

Callan scoured the package. In the box was the camera, wrapped in a small polybag, video and usb cables, a 16MB XD memory card in an antistatic pouch, a cradle adapter for the optional finepix cradle dock, a 92 page manual (only 89 printed pages), quick start guide, Finepix viewer and editing software CD-ROM, two heavy duty Panasonic Photo strength Alkalines, and two sheets of corrections to the manual. It seemed a nice package, yet something was missing. Where was the case? Obviously, the camera came without one. Luckily, the Coolster had a spare case he could put the camera in, though it was very large and unpadded. The camera itself, was a compact model, and though it wasn't small, it wasn't big. It was roughly the same size as the Jenoptik, but not as slim. (In fact, before he rooted out the case from the living room floor - no he doesn't live in a house that's a candidate for Kim 'n' Aggie - well maybe, but nowhere near as bad as what you see on the show, he'd successfully managed to fit it in the Jen's case, although after a year the velcro on the Jen's case wasn't as clingy as it should be).

NICE TO SEE YOU, HOW TICKLED I AM, GREAT SMASHING SUPER, IT'S THE WAY I TELL 'EM, NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THIS BUT..., - THE FIRST IMPRESSIONS!

He carefully removed the seal on the Polybag protecting the camera, and upon doing so the word 'void' became visible several times all over the seal. The A330 felt lightweight and a little 'plasticky', but not flimsy or like a toy. In fact there was a metal chassis to which the plastic front and back were attached, as well as other metal parts, namely the shutter release, zoom lense bevels, and 4 way navigational buttons. Although it didn't look like a 4 way navigational pad, it was, and it functioned perfectly as one. It was easy enough to insert the batteries, yet the XD card was a different matter. Although a gold strip on the camera told you the correct way to insert it (with the contacts facing the strip) unusually, it didn't slide fully into the slot, and when the Coolster first inserted it, the camera didn't seem to recognise it. He thought it was stuck half way and tried pushing it further. He quickly realised it didn't go further, and closed the cover. Thankfully the camera recognised it.

Then he attatched the strap. It was more fiddly than the strap had been on his jenoptik, or his old Konika, due to the fact that the space to push it through was smaller, but he eventually did it. He also noticed that the plastic part of the strap that the main strap was attached to seemed broken. Then he realised it was not the case, as the top part slid up and down the strap. He wondered why this was so, and was puzzled by it at first, until he realised it was to tighten the strap around the photographers wrist. 'That's neat', Callan thought. 'Even my Canon doesn't have that feature.'

HMM NOW WHERE DOES THIS BIT GO?

A quick glance at the manual revealed that Callan had the option of powering up in either capture or playback modes. To start in capture mode, you have to slide the lens cover back until it clicked twice. Leaving after the first click merely opened the cover to reveal the lens, whereas the second click powered the camera on. It gave a sort of robotic, or sci-fi like series of futuristic beeps, a bit like R2D2, or some mobile phones, and the Fujinon 3x zoom lens popped out.

Callan however, originally opted to open in playback mode to set up the camera, although he quickly realised to set image size and scene modes he should have been in capture mode. This was Soon resolved.

THE BIGGER PICTURE!

The Camera had three resolution settings, and four scene modes, to assist in taking the perfect picture. As it was a 3MP camera, its top setting was 2016 x 1512 pixels, marginally smaller than the 2048 x 1536 pixels size that most 3MP cameras used. This puzzled Callan, as the A340 was a 3.2MP camera, whilst most 3.0 and 3.1 MP camera recorded images at the higher 2048 x 536 setting. Was the 3.2 figure a con? The manual stated 3.3MP total and 3.2MP effective, so it appeared to be correct. The other available resolutions were 1600 x 1200 (2MP) and 1280 x 960 which is 1.3MP, though some 1.3 cameras capture at 1280 x 1024. Also, unless you were taking 3MP images, there was also a lack of any apparent quality settings that give a user control over how much compression is used. Whilst you can choose between normal and fine settings at this size, if you use the other settings you can't. So if you wanted to reduce 2MP quality to normal to squeeze more images on the 16MB XD card, you couldn't. An average file size for a fine 3MP image, so the manual stated was 1.5 megabytes. Reducing the quality to normal virtually halved the file size to 760KB, which was great if you needed more space to fit more images in, but quality obviously dropped a lot. With the supplied 16MB XD card it was possible to take 10 3MP pictures in fine mode, 20 at normal mode, 25 2MP pictures (presumably at the equivalent of the fine setting, as files weighed in around the 62 KB mar, whilst the 1.3MP setting allowed 33 x 460 KB images to be saved on the card. The manual also gave figures for higher capacity cards, and Callan noted that the manual quoted figures for doubling the card size meant that more than double the amount of images could be fitted, probably due to more efficient formatting of the card, though the difference was typically only 1 extra image. It was also possible to resize larger images down to 1.3MP using the crop feature, but Callan hasn't used that feature yet, even though he should have on his day out to Rhyl at the weekend, when most pictures were accidentally taken at 2MP by mistake. That way he could have squeezed more images on. He did think that the 16 MB XD card as supplied was a bit meagre, as he could only fit 33 images on at lowest resolution. In comparison, the jenoptik when capturing images on it's 8MB internal memory had managed 50 images at 'Normal' setting, whilst he had squeezed 59 1024 x 768 pixel images onto the 8MB compact flash card of the Cannon.

SETTING THE SCENES (AND OTHER THINGS FOR THAT MATTER).

The camera also had 4 scene modes in addition to the Auto and (alas not fully) manual modes. Auto mode, as expected took care of everything automatically, including shutter flash mode, speed, aperture size, focus, white balance and exposure (EV), yet the only settings you could change in the Manual mode were the flash, exposure and white balance settings (WB). In preference to other cameras there were 7 WB settings, two more than the normal 5 that most cameras have. As well as the normal auto, daylight, cloudy, and tungsten, and the A 330 sported no fewer than 3 additional settings for daylight, cool white, and warm white fluorescent settings, as opposed to a single fluorescent setting with most cameras. It was obvious what the difference between a cool white and a warm white fluorescent light was, but what was a daylight fluorescent lamp? And whereas many cameras also let the user choose between UK and US lighting frequencies, this was not present here. Callan also noted that the tungsten setting was called 'Incandescent light' with this camera, which may confuse some people, though the icon of a light bulb should clarify this, as well as noting that the 3 fluorescent icons were the same with a 1, 2, and 3 added to differentiate, but it meant that the user had to remember what 1, 2, and 3 meant, which was complicated.

TESTING TESTING 1, 2, 3, 4, FLASH!

In his tests using cuddly toys, Callan noted that under tungsten or incandescent light then whichever white balance was specified, the results were the same when the auto flash setting was used. The Slow synch setting blurred the shots and should only be used for outdoor night shots. Yet Callan's night shot tests also revealed that the slow synch flash mode (which could only be used in manual or night mode) blurred everything. In the night mode only slow synch or flash off was available, and although the background was well lit in this mode, it was blurred and did have an orange like cast to it, whereas the foreground was perfectly exposed but blurred. In portrait and auto modes using an auto flash, although an auto focus the warning appeared, but the images were correctly exposed and focused. His Jenoptik with it's CMOS sensor, in similar conditions failed to even light up the foreground, leaving a black screen, so top marks to Fuji there. The only drawback was that the background was not illuminated as good as in night mode, but the lights from the living windows were captured satisfactorily. 'It looks like night mode should be forgotten unless you have a tripod.' Thought Callan. 'Folks should stick to auto or portrait modes instead.' The Coolster concluded that unlike the Jenoptik, the auto white balance was much about the same as with the other white balance settings, and didn't leave indoor tungsten light photo's with creamy whites like some cameras.

DIGGIN' THE SCENES !

Callan liked the scene modes. He noted that the auto mode set everything automatically, from white balance down to the flash mode used, and did a decent job. In this mode, the flash never over flooded the picture, even though sometimes faces were a little on the bright side, they were never washed out by the flash. Another difference he noticed with the Jenoptik, was that the flash fired when using the macro mode indoors, even on auto mode, and meaning that clear macro's were a doddle, and the flash seemed to set itself to fill in the amount needed so that the image was not 'Flashed out', which contrasted with the Jen's lack of fill in flash. (As the Jenoptik 'Flashed out' things too close that was why it turned itself off in macro mode).In auto mode, image stabilisation seemed to be operative, and several times the Auto focus inability waning, or the auto exposure warning appeared, but the resulting shots were perfect. 'This really is a point and shoot camera,' he thought. 'It's almost impossible to take a blurred shot in auto mode.'

The sports and portrait modes seemed similar to auto mode, in that both seemed to take decent shots, although Callan hadn't shot any images of fast moving things. A portrait of his brother in laws face taken in sports mode even showed a baked bean falling off his fork without being blurred. 'This camera seems to be OK for soccer matches and the like,' Callan enthused, 'Though I don't know how sharp a Rally car would turn out in this mode.' He was a little puzzled as to why the flash never fired in this mode, so if you know, tell him!

The portrait mode produced equally sharp results, and although the manual promised better warmer skin tones, Callan hadn't taken a photo of someone in this mode, just shots around the house. Landscape mode, by contrast, seemed to capture low light scenes with the correct lighting, but the results were blurred. 'H'mm, it seems this is another tripod mode.' The Coolster also noted that whatever mode you were in, you often got auto focus or exposure warnings (red for focus, a white hand for when a tripod is recommended ), yet the pictures came out fine. Granted the image may be a little more over exposed if the flash was used, but on the whole the pictures were sharp.

The screen was easy enough to understand, and the picture and flash modes were easy to understand. Images remaining, was in the top right, and flash and shooting modes were in the top left corners respectively, with the image size in the top centre. The screen was easy to turn off, although it took three presses of the button, due to the fact that it first changed to a screen without information, then a screen divided into squares for easier framing. Callan had seen a Fuji digital camera where the viewfinder did this, and thought that as the LCD showed a true picture of what would be captured, this framing guide would only be of use in a viewfinder when the LCD wasn't being used, and not on an LCD screen. 'In a darkened room the guides would be invisible on the screen' the Coolster chortled to himself.

EASY OR WHAT?

The camera itself, he thought, was easy to use. The zoom rocker in co-ordination with the macro and flash buttons combined to produce a very effective 4 way pad. 'Some digicam users would find the fact that the OK button is not in the centre of this cluster a problem, but as it was in the same place on my Jenoptik, I find it a joy to use. And the menus all operate in the same way as the ones on my Jenoptik, though the positioning of items between the menus is different.' In fact he was speeding through the menus with ease in no time. The only thing that foxed him was getting the LCD to stay off at power up. He'd turned the setting for 'Image' off in the setup menu, but this had only been for the auto image preview. It didn't take him long to find the setting named LCD and set it to off.

Taking a photo was as imple as giving a half press of the shutter (after which a beep sounds) to lock the autofocus and exposure, and gave beautiful results that a novice would be impressed with.

STAYING POWER!

Fuji claimed an exceptional battery life in the manual. The two photo strength alkalines only lasted for about 50 shots (though in fairness the LCD and was on a lot), compared to the manual's quoted figure of 160 with LCD and 250 without.. Fuji's own NIMH battery was supposed to last for 250 shots with screen on and 400 without, whilst two 2300 mah NIMH rechargeables should last for 330 with the screen on, and 540 frames without it. The Coolster was still on his first set of 1000 mah NIMH batteries after almost a fortnight, and hadn't seen a battery warning yet, so it looked as if Fuji's quoted figures, whilst possibly being a little on the high side, would be no more than 25% out. 'My Jenoptik's batteries only last a week, so this Fuji's really frugal on juice.' Cool enthused. 'Two sets of good photo strength rechargeables should be more than enough for all but the most arduous of photographers.' He thought. There's no danger of the batteries running out at your Auntie Mabel's 70th birthday bash.' he thought. His ex wife's sister had attended a birthday party with her Fuji A 205s (the model is based on a design that's two years old) a fortnight before the camera arrived, and her's had run out mid party. 'I guess Fuji have more than doubled the battery life of it's new cameras.' he enthused. Callan reckoned that a fully charged set of half photo strength NIMH's would easily last most nights out, even if you were attending one of those all night raves. He thought that he should inform people that it's sometimes possible to pick up sets of NIMH or NICAD batteries in the pound shops. Indeed, he himself had picked up two packs of the 1000 mah batteries he was using from the well known chain store that sold everything for a pound. That meant he would never be without charged batteries, for only £2.00. In fact, the batteries ran out the day after his day trip to Rhyl, meaning they lasted exactly a fortnight.

NO HALF MEASURES FROM THESE OPTICS!

The Fujinon zoom lens captured high quality shots. Even at full length, it showed hardly any signs of distortion, giving crystal clear images. However, it was all to easy for the 1.6 x digital zoom to kick in if the photographer wasn't careful. In some modes, digital zoom didn't kick in at all until the marker reached the top of the scale, whereas in other modes, a marker 2/3rds of the way up the sliding scale indicated the point at which digital zoom kicked in. Although it wasn't a fully selectable zoom lense (it only moved in 10 steps not fluidly), Callan couldn't tell this at all, and it was only the review of the camera on www. stevesdigicams.com that alerted him of this. 'Like me, most folk won't even notice' he thought. The macro mode gave flawless images straight off, and the flash fired in this mode,. The quality of macro shots was so good, that after his first macro shot displayed it's super clarity in the monitor, callan thought that perhaps all images looked sharp in the monitor. Luckilly this was not so, meaning Callan could delete unesseccary blurred shots. In fact the macro quality was that good it took his breath away. The digital zoom however was alet down.

ZOOM ZOOM ZOOM! DI-GI-TAL ZOOM!

Unlike his Jenoptik, Callan noticed that even at low levels of digital zoom, it clearly showed on the images. The optical Zoom was not available for the movie mode, although the digital was. Here it worked flawlessly, just like on a camcorder, and the movie images were clear, well saturated, and correctly exposed, unlike his old Konica KD100 (see review) which gave pale overexposed video's. There was a choice of 320x240 or 160 x 120 resolutions. Unlike the previous generations paltry 20 second clip length, this camera took videos of up to a minute at 320x240, and four minutes at 160 x 120. The Jenoptik had been able to capture a minutes footage with sound at 320x240 on its 8 meg internal memory. This Fuji took a minutes worth to fill it's 16mb card sans sound. The quality of the Fuji's output was much better, although there was nothing wrong with the Jenoptik's video mode, in fact the Jen gave more vibrant colours, but the loss of quality was obvious. The frame rate was only 10 fps, making movies A Buster Keaton affair, although in fairness the images were less jerky than those produced by the Jenoptik at up to 15 fps.

THE SECOND TEST - FUJI VS ANASTASIS!

Callan thought that his camera deserved a good test of it's capabilities, and that came three days after the camera arrived, when a group from his church visited the hospital ship MV Anastasis, a hospital ship converted from an old cruise liner built in 1953. The lighting was not ideal, but the camera gave sharp results. The zoom lens proved more than capable. At 1.3 Megapixels, he was able to fit approximately forty images on the supplied 16Mb card. The shot's were all sharp, and the focus was reasonably accurate, as well as the colour saturation being vibrant. The auto focus and exposure performed well, as the uploaded shots show. In fact, most of Callan's images needed no sharpening at all in camera, even at the 1.3 MP mode. Callan feels that the free grub on offer that night (have you ever known him to pass up on a freebie? Exactly, neither have I) was sensational 'Top Scram our kid, you should've tried the mini pizza's and the pastries. Mmmm! Delicious! Oh, but you weren't there, were you?'

NEVER MIND THE WIDTH, LOOK AT THE QUALITY!

There was very little noise to the images, and Chromatic abhorrations were thankfully on the low side. This was one thing that blighted the Jenoptik. Whilst it captured superb shot's, those purple fringes around objects often spoiled a picture, especially where pavements were concerned. Moir was also conspicuous by it's absence. Callan was pleased about this, as it was a minor issue with his Jen. Overall, image quality was excellent, although when viewing images at 50% magnification, often the detail looked awful as the image appeared over sharp, and items such as sweat on someone's brow seemed to accentuate this. Red eyes did often occur, although the level of redness wasn't a serious issue. Even in auto flash mode, the images showed vet little red eye if any.

MANHATTAN TRANSFER? SORRY WER'RE IN ENGLAND OLD CHUM!

Image transfer to a PC could be done in one of two ways. You could let the camera do it for you by when the camera is detected upon connection, or you could use explorer as a removable drive. Upon connection, the bundled finepix viewer software loads. You then have the option to save the images to disc. The first time Callan fired the camera up, the software automatically detected the main folder where his images from his Jenoptik were stored, and created it's on sub folder off it. Callan had the option of specifying the JPEG compression ratio before he saved the images, as well as saving the images as Tiffs or Bitmaps. A typical 1 MP Tiff weighed in at an average size of 8 Mb. But letting the camera do all the work had two main flaws. Firstly, it created a date stamped sub folder for every day you downloaded images. Download once a day and you get loads of sub folders breeding like rabbits. Download several times a day and you only get one folder per day. As the camera only saved images as JPEGS, no quality gain could be made saving to the hard drive as tiffs. Also, by default the programme re-named the files to a date encoded filename that was longer than the default DSCF format that the camera saved images in. Callan disabled this. He also noticed that the camera gave each image a different file numberthat followed on from the last image recorded, even after all images had been deleted. It didn't reset to 001, even after a battery change. Also, the camera didn't reset the date after replacing the batteries either. 'That's great' he thought. 'At least I don't have to reset the date every time I change the batteries, wasting precious battery power doing so.' Amazingly, the viewer operated whenever he plugged his Jenoptik in, and downloaded to a folder with the Jen's set date in it, alhough the olnly drawback waass that the AVI movie files were renamed as WMV windows movie files. This, the Coolster thought, reduced their quality.,yet the Fuji's own movies didn't suffer from this loss of quality.

A LITTLE WEAR ON THE SOFT SIDE.

The Fuji Finepix viewer software was very easy to use, although seriously limited in its image editing qualities. The best it could do was fix focus, and exposure and these were not as good as doing things manually in a good image editor such as Photo Impact 6. It was however a brilliant file viewer. Not only was it possible to make slide shows of every image on the hard drive, you could choose to view slide shows of selected folders. Clicking an image opened your windows designated image editor, which in Callan's case was Photo Impact 6 .Callan noted that folders appeared in the thumbnails as a folder divided into 4 main visible images, the first four in the folder, which was miles better than boring old folder icons as it gave the user an idea of the folders contents. Also included on the software front was, Pixelas 'Image mixer VCD 2' which surprisingly wasn't a VCD creation programme for your movies, but an album compiling utility. Surprisingly, there was no movie creation software whatsoever included in the package.

Another great asset was the Exif information that the camera embedded into the photographs. Using Photoimpact 6, a wealth of information could be gleamed about each photograph, such as it's exposure time, F-stop setting, aperture and brightness, metering mode, flash bits per pixel,focal plane X and Y resolution, sensing method, inoperability index and Exif R98 version. The Focal plane resolutions for X and Y both being 2466 (is this pixels?) led the coolster to suspect that this was exactly the same camera as its bigger brother the 4 MP 340, but with different firmware to limit it to 3 Mp. He wondered if there were any Ciaoers out there could confirm this, and wondered if getting a firmware update for the A 340 from the Fuji website would give him a 4 MP camera for the price of a 3 MP one.

SPIDER CAM? SPIDER CAM? DOES WHATEVER A WEBCAM CAN!

The camera could be used as a web cam, but only if you have windows XP, so Callan couldn't try it out. He did make use of the video out facility, and noted that video's looked good on a TV set, similar in quality to an old analogue camcorder.

DOING THINGS BY THE BOOK (INSTRUCTION BOOK THAT IS)!

The manal was quite a decent affair, so Callan thought. Each section was clearly and simply if sometimes too simply explained. Often there'd be tips on how best to use the camera, such as, for example showing how to focus when there are two subjects. And although it was probably written and translated by someone Japenese, there were very few of those bad English translations you often get. And this was the first manual the Coolster had ever seen with a page of corrections added later. 'Well done Fuji!' said Callan.

THE FINAL WHISTLE!

All in all, the Coolster concluded that the Fuji Finepix A 330 was an excellent starter camera for anyone wanting to enter the world of digital photography. 'If you can get it on the web for a ton or less you'll be getting a great deal. Some places were doing the premium kit version with the addition of Fuji's Finepix cradle for downloading images and recharging the batteries (worth £60), an extra 64 MB XD card, and a case worth a tenner, all for £150 smackeroonies. The acclaimed camera site 'Steve's Digicams' had stated that they felt unable to recommend it as an indoor flash camera, but the Coolster thinks his test shots prove them wrong. 'In short,' enthused Callan 'This is an easy to use camera, with image quality to match, and I'm very pleased with it.'

A LITTLE EXTRA TIME! (Dec 05)

'The Camera's now discontinued, but you may be able to buy it from Empire Direct for £90, or in Amazon's marketplace for £60 (refurbished), or for between £60 - £80.00 in one of the many E-Bay shops,' remarked Callan, 'But remember, you'll have to add postage as well. With 5 MP cameras now being this cheap on the High Street, it's not such a bargain anymore.'

Fuji Finepix A330: I chose this camera because it seemed to offer the right balance of price, performance and ease of use - I bought it for my wife who isn't technical litterate. I also invested in a cradle for ease of connection to my PC. I was led to believe that with this, downloading to the PC would be as automatic as possible - ldeal for my wife.

The operation of the camera is fine. It is my first digital camera, so I have nothing else to compare it with, but with a little practise it seems to do what it says on the box. However, in the hands of my wife even the auto settings seem complex.

The worst was yet to come. I have spent a whole weekend trying to get it to take to XP. There are countless websites that try to solve the 'autoplay' problem, but none of the suggestions work. Why? because it's a problem with XP and until it is fixed, Fuji can't get the camera to work with the supplied software. So why do they supply the software and let people waste their time with software that doesn't work?

The A330 looks smart and sturdy while being compact enough for a small handbag or pocket. The picture quality is great for most people's requirements. The sliding cover on the front if not fully clicked home will prevent the camera from working. This also can be shut by accident while adjusting the zoom control preventing the picture from being taken. This happened to me in one of those once-in-a-lifetime moments although I had only had the camera for 3 days.

Have had this Fuji Finepix A330 digital camera for about 2 1/2 weeks taken around 100 or so pics and about 6-7 movies and am very pleased with the results. I prefer to use the 3 megapixel "fine" setting for the quality it gives which allows me 42 shots with the 64mb xd memory card purchased with the camera (it comes with a par for the course 16 mb card allowing 10 shots at the 3meg fine setting)I will probably get a 128 mb card next for added storage.Battery usage is predictably high used 2 sets of alkalines incuding the ones that came with the camera,will invest in some Ni-mh rechargeables. Lastly, i'm impressed with the Finepixviewer software it's quick and quite straightforward to use with some handy features.

All in all i'm very pleased with the purchase.