Rating: 
Summary: Best value around - the trick with selecting your camera.
Review: I have owned this camera for 10 months, and have taken it all over the world. I continue to be very pleased with the performance, and amazed at the picture quality. I was a professional photographer for some years, and so I was not expecting such good quality from a mid-range "point and shoot" camera.I have heard a lot of nonsense spoken about digital cameras, especially that "you need the most megapixels you can get". This is simply not true. The Fuji is a 2.1 Mpixel unit, meaning that you can take pics from 640x480 up to 1600x1200 pixels. More pixels does NOT mean a sharper picture - it means a bigger picture, both on screen and on paper when you print it. However, a big reason that people use digital cameras is so that they can email pics to loved ones. A 1600x1200 pic in fine mode runs out at 760 kb - about the biggest size you would want to try to email. Personally, I use 1280x960 in normal mode, which uses about 310 kb per pic. (A 640x480 pic is 90 kb). The supplied 8mb memory card holds about 24 pics at 1280x960. I bought a 32mb Viking card ... which holds 99 of these pics, and it works great. The 1280x960 resolution gives me a letter sized print (8.5"x11") with good quality. How much bigger does anyone need to go? You only need more megapixels if you are a pro photographer or if you plan to print out poster sized prints all of the time. The optical zoom works very well on the Fuji, but you should use the LCD screen to compose - the viewfinder is not completely accurate. (You get more picture on the left side than the viewfinder shows). The slow synch flash setting that is available is not a common feature on cameras at this price, but is superb for taking night time pics where you want the subject (e.g. your loved one) lit by flash, while also getting the background (e.g. city lights) properly exposed. All in all I am extremely pleased with this product. I bought a top of the line Sony 3 years ago, and the Fuji blows it away. Nowadays I don't even bother taking my 35mm SLR with me!
Happy Snapping!
Rating:
Summary: Great new toy
Review: I just started using this camera and was pleasantly surprised about a couple things: 1. the enclosed 8mb smart media card can actually hold quite a good number of the lowest resolution pictures, the kind you'd post on the internet. So, even though I upgraded and bought a 64MB card, the 8mb card is not even full at 50 some pictures (set at 640). 2. Easy to use and get started, with minimal extras (i.e. no black&white/fusia color capabilities - and anyway, you can do this using a software editing package). The two dowsides that I painfully discovered: 1. The enlcosed USB connection to the PC does not support Windows NT, for uploading images to your computer. I'm not sure the answer here, but I'm guessing I have to invest dollars into another input device 2. It is way too easy to Format (Initailize) the Smart Media card, which will erase all stored and protected images. Unfortunately, I let a friend play around with the camera and he did just that - erased everything, by selecting Format. It did ask him if it was "OK", confirming what he was about to do, but if you're not careful, you'll be deleting your vacation. All in all, so far I'm happy with the purchase
Rating: 
Summary: No comparison for the money...
Review: I purchased this camera 3 weeks ago along with another different manufacturer's camera. Found it on sale due to the release of the 2600. This camera outshines the competition. Very easy to use, beautiful pictures, quick uploads, no install problems on Win ME. I carry it with me daily and have used it daily to print pics from. All I can say is run, don't walk to buy it. Only negative is battery life but that's a given. Be sure to invest in a camera case for protection and larger Smart Media card.
Rating:
Summary: No comparison for the money...
Review: I purchased this camera 3 weeks ago along with another different manufacturer's camera. Found it on sale due to the release of the 2600. This camera outshines the competition. Very easy to use, beautiful pictures, quick uploads, no install problems on Win ME. I carry it with me daily and have used it daily to print pics from. All I can say is run, don't walk to buy it. Only negative is battery life but that's a given. Be sure to invest in a camera case for protection and larger Smart Media card.
Rating:
Summary: Very impressive
Review: I purchased this camera because of its 3x optical zoom. I am very impressed with the picture quality and the battery consumtion seems good even with using the lcd monitor for taking pictures. I would recommend rechargeable batteries though The only downside to it so far is the battery cover doesn't stay shut.
Rating:
Summary: Great little widget that distracts me from my SLR!
Review: I received the FinePix 2400 as a gift, and the instant gratification factor of seeing and saving or deleting photos immediately, ease of USB connection downloading to my laptop, plus the resolution quality that, at a minimum, rivals film prints are keeping this thing in my hands more than my Canon Elan IIe SLR (which I still love). I didn't expect that to happen, as I tend to turn my nose up at point-and-shoots, but this camera rocks. It's a joy to play with as soon as you open the package. Slide film might still have an edge on resolution, but hey, instant digital is instant digital - no wait, no fuss, and no distortions in contrast, scratches, dust inside the body, or what-have-you that unavoidably occur in developing prints. The downsides are several but all relatively minor. First, it won't completely replace your SLR. The FinePix 2400 has a reasonable amount of added manual control which is nice for us tweakers, but it's slightly cumbersome to navigate menus and buttons, compared to most automatic SLRs that you have familiarity with and which have far more versatility for fixing the lighting and other problems another reviewer mentioned. (Still, I've gotten some great photos of lit up buildings at night with some slight tweaking!) Second, the viewfinder is a pain for people like me whose left eye is better than our right; I find myself constantly wiping nose smudges off the digital viewscreen and hoping I don't scratch the latter. Third, the viewfinder doesn't correspond as well as it should to the real frame of the photo--I keep thinking I've got the perfect composition only to find out the field of view on the actual photo is larger than I expected. You move closer and hope, a bit. Fourth, if you're sometimes impatient with the zoom, like I am, it occasionally goes a bit loopy in extending and retracting until you turn it off and/or shut the lens cover. Fifth, as everyone else says, it eats batteries voraciously, particularly if you use the digital viewing screen in its "movie camera viewing mode" (I always turn it off completely except to view photos); a rechargeable adapter of some kind is necessary and on my shopping list. Sixth, get at least a 32 MB or bigger flash card. 8MB is not enough; 128MB will keep you more than happy. That said, I haven't needed a tripod with this camera. It's been remarkably steady even with low-light indoors or outdoors, but one can't hurt, especially not my ultra-compact plastic mini-tripod. Plus, unlike other reviewers, I wouldn't want more annoying questions than the existing two stages standing between me and deleting photos. No bigger than most point and shoots, the FinePix 2400 is nicely compact and its photo quality is such that I more often than not end up leaving my SLR at home, just to save weight and bulk and avoid attracting too much attention with expensive gadgets while roaming about Eastern Europe (unless I know I need the SLR for the perfect picture). The software bundle is also a plus--although the included Adobe version is rather stripped down, it does fine in basic, necessary touch-ups of digital or scanned film. You can adjust color balance, do continuous shots, and all sorts of other nifty things with the FinePix 2400, but the basic point-and-shoot operation is easy and results are high quality!
Rating:
Summary: Excellent Value!
Review: I received this camera for Christmas and I think it's great! I bought 4 rechargeable NiMH batteries, a 32 MB card and an ac adapter as recommended by reviews I had read. I was able to start taking pictures as soon as I took the camera out of the box and it took me only about 5 minutes to install the software on my computer and start viewing the pics. My only other experience with digital photography was using two different models of the Sony Mavica. I found my Fuji 2400 Zoom to be much easier to use and the pictures are clearer (although that could just be because I never really figured out how to set the Mavicas properly). I don't have a photo printer at the moment so I don't know what the printed photos look like. Most of the digital images I've taken have been very sharp especially outdoors with good light levels. Nighttime shots are another matter altogether. I have been unsuccessful in taking scenery shots at low light levels. However, I was never able to do this with my point and shoot regular camera. This is not a camera for professional photographers or even aspiring photographers; this is a camera for those who just want to remember their vacations, birthday parties and everyday events. Overall, I'm extremely pleased with this camera, especially since it only costs about ($).
Rating:
Summary: Good entry level camera
Review: I was a little leary of buying one of these because I was spoiled by having a 5Meg camera for 2 years, but I was pleasantly surprised. First of all, the battery life is much better than I had expected for an optical zoom camera. That alone made me very happy. The pictures are acceptable at 2 Megs and as long as you aren't looking for perfection, they are good enough for most applications. Finally, it is relatively small and light and easy to carry around.
Drawbacks, the software included isn't intuitive at all. I wasn't even sure if I had installed the correct program. The camera menus are also a little hard to understand unless you read the manual a couple of times.
Rating:
Summary: Good entry level camera
Review: I was a little leary of buying one of these because I was spoiled by having a 5Meg camera for 2 years, but I was pleasantly surprised. First of all, the battery life is much better than I had expected for an optical zoom camera. That alone made me very happy. The pictures are acceptable at 2 Megs and as long as you aren't looking for perfection, they are good enough for most applications. Finally, it is relatively small and light and easy to carry around.
Drawbacks, the software included isn't intuitive at all. I wasn't even sure if I had installed the correct program. The camera menus are also a little hard to understand unless you read the manual a couple of times.
Rating:
Summary: A great successor to the 1400
Review: I've been shooting the Finepix 1400 for a year, so I was interested in this camera when it came out. I recently had the opportunity to play with one for a while and I was impressed with what I saw. It's a well thought out design, still a good value, and an excellent example of technological evolution. More than just a higher-resolution version of the 1400, the Finepix 2400 is an evolutionary successor that builds on the features of the 1400. The ergonomics that made the 1400 easy to use are still there, but the resolution is doubled, and there's a lot more manual control available- something I find myself missing in the 1400. While the automatic mode produces fine exposures, photographers used to the flexibility of a manual camera will find much to like here. There's more exposure control, a new color balance control, and a sequence shooting capability that should please sports fans. All this for a price not much higher than that of the 1400 a year ago. There are a few downsides. Shooters with a dominant left eye will find the optical viewfinder hard to use as their noses will tend to get in the way. The supplied 8MB Smart Card is far too small; you'll need a 32MB or preferably a 64MB card to take advantage of the camera's capability. Luckily the price of memory has plummeted over the past year, so that's no real drawback. In short, this is a reasonably priced camera with good resolution and good optics that's suitible for the novice or the experienced photographer. I expect it'll be as big a hit with buyers as the Finepix 1400 was.
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