Cons: Halos around object edges, LCD only for good lighting, fixed aperture, poor controls, xD card
The Bottom Line: Although the Fuji FinePix A350 is inexpensive, feature-rich, easy to use and features high resolution, I only recommend it if you want...
dkozin's Full Review: FUJIFILM FinePix A350 Digital Camera
After being disappointed with the Fuji FinePix A345 4.1-Megapixel digital camera, decided to try the 5.2-Megapixel Fuji FinePix A350. I got it for $170, which is a rather low price for a 5.2-Megapixel digital camera with 3x optical zoom and a 1.7-inch LCD screen. Do you get what you pay for? Let's find out.
What is Fuji FinePix A350?
The Fuji FinePix A350 is an inexpensive 5.2-Megapixel digital camera with 3x optical zoom (38-114 mm equivalent), 1.7-inch LCD screen, optical zooming viewfinder, USB and A/V connections. The A350 is PictBridge compliant and can be used to print directly without a computer.
The camera uses 2 AA batteries (disposable batteries included), has a flash with red-eye reduction function and uses xD-Picture memory cards (16 MB card included). The camera also has a movie mode with sound (320x240 or 160x120 at 15 fps).
The camera is very similar to the A345, aside from higher resolution.
Getting Started
Once I opened the box, I saw that the camera and its accessories looked exactly like the A345. The camera has a front with nice chrome accents and the lens is nicely retracted flush with the camera body, similar to the A345.
The A350 is rather compact and fits in a pant pocket or a purse. It is made of light plastic and feels sturdy, but not overly so. Controls have decent feel to them, aside from the zoom control, which makes slight creaking sounds when twisted. The chrome accents and the LCD seem to develop smudges easily though.
The battery and memory compartment lid at is its bottom of the camera. The battery polarity and memory card direction markings are not well visible, so you have to peek inside the battery compartment to see the required load polarity. Once I loaded the batteries (1600 mAh NiMH Panasonic batteries) and the supplied 16 MB xD-picture memory card, I was ready to shoot.
Camera Controls
The A350 has a power button and a shutter release button on the top deck. If you depress and hold the power button, the lens extends, the lens lid opens and the LCD illuminates, at which point you are ready to shoot. It takes between 3 and 5 seconds for the camera to power up. Strangely, it takes more time if you have not used the camera for a while and takes less time if you just turned it off.
You do the same to turn the camera off - depress and hold the button. The lens retracts and the lid closes, protecting the lens. It takes a couple of seconds.
The back of the camera houses a 1.7-inch LCD screen, an optical viewfinder, a sliding switch between review, video and photo modes, four buttons and a zoom control.
The camera has an unusual zoom control. It is a little joystick-like control that can be twisted/shifted up or down. You push it up to zoom in or down to zoom out. You also use it to control menus (to move up or down within them). This control is stiff and does not provide much feedback.
The side of the camera has a USB port, an A/V port and a DC power port. All ports are exposed and have no lid over them. Make sure you don’t get sand over them!
Operation
Once the camera is powered on, you can take pictures. The viewfinder and the LCD have a clearly defined central area where the camera focuses. You point that area on the subject you want the camera to focus on and depress the shutter release button halfway. The camera focuses and beeps. Then you can re-point (recompose) the camera while still keeping the shutter release button depressed halfway and then push the button all the way to make the camera take a picture.
The camera focuses rather quickly. Indoors, in electric light, it focused consistently faster than an expensive Sony DSC-H1 (about 1-2 seconds versus 3 seconds). But the camera has no focus assist light and sometimes (in dimly-lit environments) cannot focus at all.
The shutter lag is less than a second (when pre-focused).
The camera has an easy-to-use menu system and lets you select resolution (5M Fine, 5M Normal setting, 3:2 for perfect fit for 6x4 prints, 3M, 2M 1600x1200 and 0.3M 640x480), shooting mode (Auto, Manual, Landscape, Portrait, etc.), ISO (Auto 64-400), white balance, timer and more.
I have not read the manual but was able to operate the camera and all its functions easily. The problem with the camera's menus is that you have to use the zoom control to navigate them as the proper menu control buttons were removed to reduce costs. So you have to use the zoom control to move up or down and the buttons on the left or right of it (macro and flash mode control) to move left and right. It feels pretty awkward.
The camera has a decent flash with a red-eye reduction mode that worked well. The flash reaches as far as 11-12 feet, a rather good performance.
I have not tried the camera's macro capability. But the camera has a fixed aperture (f/2.8 at wide angle, f/4.7 at full telephoto). The camera does not show you the shutter speed or the aperture in shooting or review mode, so you have no idea what will be blurry and what will not.
By looking at the EXIF information, I noticed that the camera only has one aperture value per focal length, which means you will not get the pictures that are sharp from foreground to background even in Landscape mode in bright light.
The manual mode is not really a manual mode but rather a programmed exposure mode with exposure adjustment in 1/3 EV steps.
The camera lacks buttons and to delete a photo in review mode you have to call up a menu and select the command to erase a photo. Worse yet, once the photo is deleted, the camera asks you if you want to delete the next photo with default answer being push OK to delete. Since the menu is called by the OK/Menu button, you tend to intuitively try to push it to get out of the delete mode. But that does the opposite and deletes your picture. I have deleted several pictures this way by mistake.
LCD
The camera has 1.7-inch LCD screen that is fluid, informative and bright enough in perfect light. It offers precise 100% coverage. But in dark environments it was too dark and even in moderate sunlight I couldn't see much despite increasing the LCD brightness. You have to use the viewfinder (which is bright, but a bit too tight).
Picture Quality
Just as A345, the A350 produces pictures that feature highly saturated but film-like colors. I like the fact that the colors are film-like, but the saturation may be too much for some people (myself included). Since the camera uses a fixed (rather fast) aperture, the pictures are sharp mostly at the distances where you focus, but not elsewhere. You cannot have both sharp foreground and background, even in bright daylight in the Landscape mode.
Worse, if you expect sharp enlargements because this camera has 5.2-Megapixel resolution, think again. The pictures I took were reasonably sharp when printed at small sizes (7x5 or 6x4), but if you print them larger or look at them on the computer screen at their actual size (pixel per pixel), you see that the pictures are not as sharp as you can get from most other 4MP cameras. The camera seems to apply a lot of sharpening, which results in sharp small prints, but you can see halos around the edges on large prints or viewing image on the computer screen at 100%.
I am not sure what is to blame here, the lens or the aggressive image noise suppression, but the fact is this camera produces images that should probably not be enlarged more than 8x10, despite their resolution.
The noise is well controlled overall. And the camera is well suited for taking portrait pictures, especially considering its large apertures.
The images were generally free of distortions and I noticed no chromatic aberration (purple fringing) to speak of. But the corners of the picure were blurrier than the center.
Computer Connectivity
I could use a USB cable that came with my Philips MP3 player as I was too lazy to get the USB cable that came with this camera out of the box. It worked well. I didn't need to install any drivers on my Windows 2000 SP4 machine and I could copy files at about 600-700 KB/s, which is about average performance. You can use a card reader that supports xD cards as well.
Bottom Line
Although the Fuji FinePix A350 is inexpensive, feature-rich, easy to use and features high resolution, I only recommend it if you want to print 7x5 or 6x4-inch photos with occasional 10x8 enlargements. If you want to larger prints, you will need a camera with better optics.
5.2 MP CCD captures enough detail for photo-quality 13 x 17-inch prints 3x optical zoom; 1.7-inch LCD display Less than 3 seconds to start-up; .1-seco...More at Amazon Marketplace
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