Fujifilm FinePix T300

Display (4.15)

The rear screen of the Fuji T300 is a standard 3-inch, 230k-dot display. It does not offer touch control, but it’s fairly bright and detailed enough for judging focus to a point. We found it has a decent angle of view horizontally for general composition, though the colors begin to appear inverted as you view it from the side. Vertically, the LCD has a very low angle of view, however, with the LCD appearing to go dark when not positioned directly behind it.

Flash (4.65)

The flash on the T300 is not particularly strong, with it only able to reach a maximum of 8.5 feet when zoomed to the widest angle possible. When shooting at the full 50mm focal length, the flash’s range falls to just 5.6 feet. The T300 also automatically deactivated the flash when shooting continuously, so the recycle time is very slow as the user must refocus and compose before the camera will fire a second shot with the flash. The camera does offer a natural/flash shooting mode that takes two images, one with the flash and one without, in order to get the most attractive shot.

Lens (6.56)

The Fuji T300 uses a 10x optical zoom Fujinon lens, with a maximum aperture range of f/3.4-5.6. From a usability standpoint the lens itself isn’t terrible, but the camera is fairly slow when zooming in. The lens collapses close to the body, barely protruding from the camera itself when the camera is turned off.

The lens on the T300 offers a focal range of 5-50mm, which strikes a good balance between wide angle and telephoto. For such a compact camera, it’s a solid range that will allow users to cover most typical shooting situations. There is also a 6.7x digital zoom functionality that can be activated in the menu, which allows the user to zoom up to 67x the wide focal length.

Zoom Ratio Examples
5.0 mm		50.0 mm

Battery (7.50)

The T300 uses an NP-45A rechargeable lithium-ion battery. It has a capacity of just 720mAh, however, and is only rated for around 180 shots by CIPA standards. The battery is charged using a provided standalone charger and it slots into a compartment on the bottom of the camera. The only issue we have with the battery beyond the limited capacity is the fact that it can slot into the compartment and lock into place backwards, so that the positive and negative terminals are in the wrong position. The camera simply doesn’t power up like this, which will cause headaches for some customers, we’re sure.

Memory (3.00)

The Fuji T300 takes SD/SDHC/SDXC memory cards, which also slot into the battery compartment on the bottom of the camera. The camera can shoot without a memory card in place, though there is a constant reminder that you’re shooting without a card and thus the images won’t be recorded, so there’s little danger of going an entire day and shooting images that go unsaved.

Jacks, Ports & Plugs (2.00)

The T300 offers just a single connectivity port on the bottom of the camera, which works for both AV and USB output. There’s no HDMI output despite the fact that the camera can shoot in 720p. The T300 comes packaged with a USB cable that hooks up to this port, though you’ll have to purchase the AV cable separately (approximately $10-15 extra) if you wish to display images directly from the camera itself.