Fujifilm FinePix HS10

NOTE: Our full review of this camera is now live here.

Manual Controls

Like most high-end point & shoot cameras, the HS10 offers a good level of manual control, with both shutter and aperture priority, and a full manual mode. You control the manual mode using the command dial, which sits to the left of the mode dial. This can only control one setting at a time though.

Focus

The HS10 offers three focus modes; you can set the AF to work continuously while the camera is on, to work only when the shutter half pressed, or to use manual focus. There are also a decent selection of options of where the camera chooses to focus: there is a center focus mode, a movable focus point mode, an automatic mode and an object tracking mode, which detects moving objects in the frame and tries to keep them in focus.

ISO

The HS10 has a wide ISO range, going from 80 right up to 3200 at the full 10 megapixel resolution of the camera. You can also squeeze a bit more out of the camera with a 6400 ISO setting, but this cuts the resolution down to 5 megapixels.

The ISO menu of the HS10

White Balance

A decent selection of white balance presets are offered, with 6 presets (including three fluorescent settings) and a custom evaluative setting.

Metering

The usual suspects for metering mode are available; evaluative, center weighted and spot. If the face detection feature is enabled, this sets the camera to use the faces for correct exposure. An exposure lock button is prominently placed on the back of the camera next to the screen, which is useful if you are in a tricky situation and want to use spot metering on an off-centered object. 

Shutter Speed

The HS10 offers a shutter speed range of 1/4 of a second to 1/4000 of a second in the automatic modes, but this can be extended to a maximum of 30 seconds in the manual modes and some of the scene modes. That's a decent range that should allow for capturing motion and low light scenes effectively. 

Aperture

The long lens has a decent aperture range at the wide end of the zoom (f/2.8 to f/11), but this range is shortened at the longer end: a the maximum, it is limited to f/5.6 to f/11. That's not unusual for long zooms like this, but it does limit what you can do when zoomed in: low light shooting will be more difficult. 

Image Stabilization

The 30x zoom lens of this camera includes an optical stabilization element, where the camera moves a small part of the lens to compensate for camera shake. We weren't able to evaluate this at the PMA show. In addition, the HS10 offers two modes that use processing to remove shake: an electronic mode that increases the shutter speed, and a multi-shot mode that takes 6 images in quick succession and processes and combines them to produce a single image which hopefully has less shake. We've tested similar modes on other cameras and found them to be pretty effective.

Picture Quality & Size Options

There are a good selection of image size options, ranging from the full 10.3 megapixel images ( 3,648 by 2,736 pixels) right down to HD resolution (1920 by 1080 pixels). There are no options for the level of JPEG compression applied to images, but the HS10 is unusual in being able to record JPEG and RAW images simultaneously, a feature that is usually only found on SLRs. This is useful as it gives you the convenience of a JPEG image and the extra image quality of a RAW image at the same time, although it does eat up a lot of storage space. 

Picture Effects

The HS10 doesn't include any special effects, but it does offer a number of film simulation modes, which are similar. These are designed to mimic the colors of different types of film, including Fuji's own Provia and Velvia brands. We weren't able to test these features at the show, but you can see examples from a previous Fuji model here.