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We clicked with:
Everything.
Shots in the dark:
I'm really struggling to find anything, all I can say is a slight noise over 400 ISO but you'd expect that.
Price Comparison:
Fujifilm F40fd
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Summary
This is the third Fujifilm compact that I've reviewed for ThinkCamera.com and you may wonder what I can say about it that's different from the other reviews. They are all excellent little cameras. They fit in your pocket (or handbag) a treat and are always ready to go.
The Fujifilm F40fd is a fabulous little camera. It is 8.3Mp, enough pixels for an enormous print and it's the first Fujifilm compact to take both XD cards and SDs. It copes exceptionally well with high contrast situations such as bright sunshine. The Fujifilm F40fd is a joy to use and never disappoints.
I got loads of lovely photos some of which I am going to use in my camera club competitions. I've even printed some out! Praise indeed. Its 2.5in LCD has a wider viewing angle than the F30 and F31fd. I did struggle a bit to see in the very bright light but that's 'cos I'm getting old I expect. At around £169 from the web it's outstanding value. I'd buy it. (If I could hide it from my husband.)
RTMF? I don't think so
I think you could pick this camera up and without resorting to the manual, ever, use it and be really pleased with the simplicity of it. The only reason I picked up the manual was to see what the thinking was behind the two SP modes (SP1 and SP2). They have the same menu items beneath them. Portrait, Landscape, Sport, Night, Fireworks, Sunset, Snow, Beach, Underwater, Museum, Party, Flower and Text.
When you take your camera out you can have the two special modes set to different scenes. For instance when I went for a walk the other day I kept it on set on Auto but I also had Flower on SP1 and Landscape on SP2. It's very quick then to change your shooting mode to suit.
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I thought I would try to use as many of the Fujifilm F40fd scenes on SP1 and SP2 as I could. The Underwater mode I skipped as you need a waterproof housing. I didn't think that Fujifilm would be very pleased if I put it in a plastic bag and poked it in the pond at my tadpoles and living near to Aylesbury the snow and the beach scenes are bit of an improvisation…
I also missed out the Natural/Flash mode as I'd used that a lot in the F30 review. Some of the others I missed for the same reason.
Snow and Skiing in Tring
If you go skiing for your holidays and you take your camera along you will probably have found that it underexposes a lot.
This is because the snow fools the camera, which thinks that everything averages out to grey. Snow doesn't and so it ends up looking grey in the picture.
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I think the F40fd did a decent job of getting the exposure as good as it could. As you can see our intrepid skier in his white furry suit is still visible against the snow and the black and white mountain cow is clear and detailed.
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A Walk on the Wild Side (Well Tring Anyway!)
I took the Fujifilm F40fd out for a walk on Good Friday. It was very sunny and warmish and I had it set on Auto, SP1 was on Flower and SP2 was on Landscape. I keep the face detection software on all the time (see the F31fd review here for details on how that works.)
The first SP mode I used was the Flower or Macro mode. I happened to take photos of flowers but obviously it's good for any close up. The F40fd suppresses the flash, sets a wide aperture and boosts the colour, so that you get photos like these.
As I said earlier in the article, Tring doesn't have a beach near it. The closest we get to a beach is in the Memorial Gardens. I used the Beach scene mode to take the photos. The F40fd will optimise the settings for a bright beach scene with bright flashes from reflections in the sea. Not quite like that in our Memorial Gardens but hey, it needed a challenge.
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Landscape mode will try to keep a very large depth of field so that everything from the foreground to the distance will be in focus and it produced a lovely sharp, perfectly exposed photograph of our church in the high street.
I took loads of photos on our walk. It was a very bright day with lots of bright light and sharp shadows but I think the Fujifilm F40fd did a marvellous job of exposing the photos perfectly. I had no blown highlights or lost detail in the shadow in any of the photos. It was brilliant.
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Don Quixote Sunset
Later that evening in anticipation of a lovely sunset I drove down to Ivinghoe Windmill a couple of miles out of Tring and waited for the sun to go down.
When there is a sunset and you have a camera set on auto white balance it will try to 'correct' the light and your photo will be disappointing but the Sunset Mode will adjust for that.
You will see the lovely colours that you remembered as in the photos below.
A Girl has to Shop
A girl has to shop and I'm no exception (I'm no girl either but we'll gloss over that.) So Saturday I drove into Aylesbury with the Fujifilm F40fd in my trusty handbag.
Much easier and lighter to carry around than my D80. There are a couple of interesting buildings (and no, I don't mean the monstrosity called County Hall…) in Aylesbury.
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One is the HBOS building. A large glass structure that leans to one side, called locally 'The Blue Leany' (Beatles…)
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The salesmen were so intrigued as to why I might be photographing it that they didn't even try to sell me anything and in the end one of them said he would buy an F40fd after I'd shown him what it could do. (Fuji note… commission…? J I can dream.)
Sporty
If you use the sport mode it will set up the camera with a fast shutter speed so that you can capture the action without blur. I took it along to a Production Car Trial that my husband was competing in and left it on Sport mode all day. I got smashing action shots like the one above.
Last but not Least
I used the Portrait mode a lot.
If it's so warm at Easter that your grandson can sit in a bucket of water in the garden you can capture the moment like this.
I used a bit of fill in flash on this one. You access it on the Fujifilm F40fd by the rocker switch on the back of the camera. It scrolls through various flash settings one by one.
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Flash on (forced), Flash off (suppressed), Slow synchro (for night scenes), Auto, Red Eye Reduction etc. As I said earlier, you don't really need to look at the manual.
As you turn the dial on the back the LCD gives you brief descriptions of what each setting does. Other settings apart from SP1 and SP2 are Auto (self explanatory), a man with the shivers (antishake), N takes a photo without flash, Cine takes a great video, M manual - set exposure compensation, photometry (spot, multi or average exposure), White balance (try cloudy if you want to take sunsets without using the sunset mode).
Continuous has three settings - Long Period - Long exposure, Last two (takes several photos if you keep the button pressed and stores the last two)
Top Two - as previous but stores first two. Then there is Natural and Flash. Does what it says on the tin with some fascinating results. I was surprised to see that sometimes I preferred the natural and sometimes the flash photo. Ideal if you're not sure what you want.
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