Digital Camera Review
May 08, 2006
- By James Murray
Positioned in the lower echelons of Fujifilm’s F-series, the FinePix F470 has a retail price of $279 and a stripped down style that emphasizes simple controls and a basic point-and-shoot aesthetic. The F470 features a 1/2.5 inch, 6 MP CCD, 16 MB of internal memory, a 3x optical zoom lens, 2.5-inch 115,000 pixel LCD screen, a handful of preset shooting modes, and a full auto mode. Manual controls aren’t overwhelming on this model, although it comes with ISO and exposure compensation in addition to preset white balance modes. The F470 does have hybrid functionality and will shoot video clips at a resolution of 640 x 480 at 30 fps with simultaneous, though not stunning, monaural audio. With an intuitive menu structure and understated design, the F470 has features that appeal distinctly to the beginners’ market.
Connectivity
Software (7.0)
The Fujifilm F470 ships with FinePix Viewer version 5.1f software. The software loaded in around seven minutes; while this seemed a bit long for a rudimentary program which is truly just a filing system for still images. Connecting the camera directly to computer and circumventing the software let us copy and paste images to the desktop in under half a minute.
Once we’d loaded the pictures, we could view images in a number of formats and sizes. Multiple filing formats and organizational systems are probably the strongest component of this program, since the actual editing features included are fairly basic. With the packaged software, users can fix red-eye, rotate images, adjust saturation, hue, brightness, contrast, sepia, black & white, sharpen and soften images, as well as adding text. The effects worked with varied success and had a tendency to skip nuanced alterations in favor of drastic change.