Fujifilm A100

Where modes are concerned, Fujifilm's pretty clear that they only cater to the photography initiates; all scene modes are thrown in along side Manual, movie, profile, macro, night and the standard ones, making for a really lengthy menu to scroll through. As I said earlier, the modes are all directed towards absolute novices - even the manual mode of the camera gives you only exposure compensation, and ISO sensitivity control and nothing else.

The camera's Macro mode yields good results, but the camera doesn't focus on objects closer than 4 inches. This is not a problem in any way, since 4 inches is the industry norm for the macro mode in ultra compacts. It's just that we've seen other low range cameras break this norm and focus on objects as close as 1-2 inches, so there's no reason for the A100 to not do so. Either way, the macro results were satisfactory.

Night mode performance left a bit to be desired. The bad image stabilization gave us trouble in hand-held shots, but when placed on a still surface/tripod, the results were a lot better. The night shots were still low on detail.

In spite of inadequate low-light performance, the ISO performance of the camera was pretty impressive. The A100 allows for shots of 100, 200, 400, 800, and 1600 ISO. The camera managed to yield reasonably detailed shots in even ISO 800, which is truly commendable.

The color reproduction was a little too saturated, but that's something you can live with. The auto-white balance on the other hand was erratic - it performed well in outdoor shots, but suffered notably in indoor ones.