Fujifilm FinePix HS10

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

Viewfinder

The HS10 has an electronic viewfinder, which is located above the LCD screen. To the left of the viewfinder is a small sensor that detects your approaching face, and switches the display from the LCD screen to the viewfinder. The viewfinder itself is bright and mostly clear, although the images do look less sharp than the LCD screen.

The viewfinder of the HS10, with the proximity sensor to the right

LCD

The LCD screen of the HS10 is a 3-inch model with a resolution of 230k pixels. That's a little on the low side for a screen of this size, and this shows in the images, which look a little grainy. If you need to get a really good preview of your photos on the screen, you'll need one that has a higher resolution screen, like the 416k pixels of the Samsung TL500. 

The LCD screen of the HS10

The screen can flip out and tilt up or down about 90 degrees for shooting from above or below, which is useful if you are trying to shoot over the heads of a crowd or into a dark hole. It can't rotate around, though, so you can't use the screen for self portraits.

The LCD screen of the HS10 flipped up

Flash

There are two flash options on the HS10; internal or external. The internal flash is a pop-up model that lives in the housing above the lens. A small button on the side releases this, and it pops up. We weren't able to test the performance of this flash, but it does seem to be a good distance from the lens, which means that it shouldn't have a big problem with red-eye. 

The built-in flash of the HS10

The other flash option is to add an external flash. These can plug into the hot shoe on the top of the camera body, just behind the internal flash.

The built-in flash of the HS10

Lens 

'Monstrous' is perhaps the best word to describe the 30x zoom lens built into the HS10: when it is fully zoomed out, it extends far enough from the camera body that you could end up poking someone in the eye when trying to do a closeup.

The HS10 lens at the wide angle setting...

...and at the longest telephoto setting

The upside of this huge lens is that it provides an extremely long zoom range; it goes from a 24mm wide angle setting to an incredible 720mm telephoto. That means it can handle everything from a landscape or group photo to zooming right in on the action at a football game. The zoom lens is also unusual in that it is a manual zoom; to zoom in and out you rotate the body of the lens, like an SLR zoom lens. It also means that the aperture range of the lens is limited: at the telephoto end of the zoom range the aperture range is f/5.6 to f/11, which means that low light shooting is going to be difficult.

The internals of the 30x zoom lens of the HS10

The long zoom also means that you are going to get big problems with camera shake. With a 720mm lens, even a slight camera shake is going to look like an earthquake. The HS10 does include several types of image stabilization, though, including optical stabilization, electronic stabilization and a multi-shot stabilization mode. With the optical image stabilization, the camera moves an element of the lens (you can see the element in the cut-away photos above). In electronic stabilization, the camera increases the shutter speed to minimize the shake. The multi-shot mode is new: here, the camera takes several shots in quick succession, and processes and combines them together to form a single, hopefully shake free image.

It can do this because this is another camera that is using Sony's new back side illuminated CMOS sensor, which can shoot and process images quickly. The same sensor technology is being used on a number of other cameras that have been recently announced from manufacturers such as Sony, Samsung and others.

We were unable to test the performance of this new lens and sensor combination, so we'll reserve judgment on how this new combination performs until we get a model in for review.

Jacks, Ports & Plugs

There are two ports under a small plastic cover on the left side of the camera body. The top port is a HDMI port for connecting the camera to a HDTV, while the bottom port is for the included USB and analog video out cables.

The ports of the HS10

Battery

The HS10 is powered by 4 AA batteries, which fit into a cavity in the handle. These batteries can be either disposable ones or NiMh rechargeable ones, but these can't be recharged in the camera: you have to use an external charger. 

The battery compartment of the HS10

Memory

Images are stored either on an SDHC memory card or on the 46MB of memory that is built into the camera. The SDHC memory cards fit into a small cavity on the right side of the camera body underneath a latched cover. an 8GB SDHC card can hold over 3000 JPEG images, or over 500 RAW images.

The memory card compartment of the HS10