Fujifilm FinePix S602 Zoom
The FinePix S602 Zoom has a professional feel, but it offers fewer megapixels than other cameras in its price range.
Nikki Echler McDonald and Carla Thornton
With its film camera-like shape, Fujifilm's FinePix S602 Zoom is a professional-looking unit. Its large grip makes the 1.3-pound camera easy to hold in one hand-even while you work the top-mounted controls for flash, exposure compensation and autobracketing. One standout feature is its 6X optical zoom lens (along with a 4.4X digital zoom). The camera houses dual media slots, one for a SmartMedia memory card (a 16MB card comes bundled with the unit) and a second slot for a CompactFlash card or a high-capacity IBM Microdrive.
Five preset scene modes give novice photographers (or advanced shooters who want to take quick shots) a range of exposure options. Loads of buttons scattered over the case help you change modes, set the exposure, and accomplish other advanced tasks fairly quickly. A few controls are placed on the left side of the barrel, but memorizing them by touch isn't difficult. Focusing manually is relatively easy, thanks to a silky focusing ring and a focus-check button that can enlarge the center of the electronic viewfinder's image. If all else fails, a cancellation button quickly focuses the picture.
The S602 Zoom's electronic viewfinder shows all of the same settings as the 1.5-inch LCD. When it's too bright outdoors to read the LCD, you can perform your work in the viewfinder--a valuable convenience. You can view a just-taken shot on the LCD for as long as you want, and you can pan and zoom within it, but you'll have to laboriously delete the rejects one by one.
The camera's long list of features includes a hot-shoe sync for an external flash; a supersensitive, top-end ISO of 1600; and sound movies. You can take photos interpolated to 6 megapixels, but in our tests of image quality, we found no difference between photos taken with the interpolated resolution activated and those taken with the effective resolution of 3.1 megapixels. Fujifilm rounds out the S602 Zoom with a thorough manual (marred only by lack of an index) and a software bundle that includes Adobe PhotoDeluxe and a videoconferencing program.
The S602 Zoom ranked in the upper half of our cameras in photo quality; it captured shades and details well but gave our mannequin slightly pink skin. With four AA batteries (rechargeables are optional), it took an above-average 425 photos.
UPSHOT: Though low on megapixels compared to the competition, the FinePix S602 Zoom compensates with a professional feel and lots of exposure, focus, and navigational features.
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