The FinePix F31fd Makes Pictures a Snap

This digital camera from FujiFilm allows even the clumsiest photog to take memorable photos, particularly those of family and friends

by Arik Hesseldahl

Editor's Rating:

The Good: Face-focus feature takes guesswork out of tricky shots

The Bad: Uses xD picture cards, which store less than SD cards

The Bottom Line: A great camera for those long-frustrated by lousy shots

Reader Reviews

If there's one thing I know how to do well, it's take a bad picture, so any camera that removes the guesswork from the process is the right camera for me.

I don't care what kind of picture it is—a gorgeous view on vacation, a group of partygoers in a dimly lit bar, a candid of a family member in the living room. Whatever the subject, I've managed to find a way to make any shot look like it was taken by a hyperactive eight-year-old, which is exactly how old I was when I got my first Kodak (EK) Instamatic as a Christmas gift about three decades ago. My best efforts rarely look much better than the crude shots I took of Star Wars action figures lined up on the kitchen counter with my Instamatic.

Yet digital cameras have come a long way—so much so that even the picture-challenged like me can point, shoot, and capture an image that is at least marginally worth putting in a desktop frame at the office. This "for dummies" approach to digital photography is embodied capably by the FujiFilm FinePix F31fd, the latest subject in our series on affordable digital cameras. Of the models I've tried so far, it's one of the best.

A Person-able Camera

Consider how it handles photos of people. The FinePix boasts a feature that detects when a face is in the frame. Hit a button and the viewfinder adds a little green box that zeroes right in on the face. The camera then adjusts to focus on the face and sets light and exposure accordingly.

This is a great help to me, as I'm generally happier taking pictures of inanimate objects. Give me an ancient monument and I'll gladly take a picture. Add a person to the frame, and I'm sure to somehow mess up the shot.

Befuddled by backlighting? You're at an afternoon party and want to snap a shot against a window. But there's too much light from the window behind the subject, and the subject ends up too dark and shadowed. Not with this camera.

Or maybe you're done in by darkness. More often than not, I want to take shots at nighttime social events, but dark scenes always perplex me. And I simply have no patience for product manuals. The result is an image with a person illuminated in ghostly white, suitable for nothing but deletion. Again, the FinePix dazzles in the dark—and compares favorably with the "best shot selection" feature on the Nikon CoolPix S9 (see BusinessWeek.com, 3/19/07, "A Nikon Pick for the Camera Shy").

Nuts and Bolts

Other features are just terrific, too. This is a 6.3-megapixel camera, which is low compared to the surge in popularity in 7-megapixel models. But megapixels on digital cameras are like megahertz on a PC microprocessor—the highest number doesn't necessarily translate to the best quality. The images I got were excellent all-around—well, excellent for me anyway—and I don't think another 100,000 pixels or so would have made much difference.

The FinePix starts up quickly, taking a little more than one second from power-up to ready-to-shoot. The lag time between shots was also really short. Instead of SD memory cards, it stores pictures on xD picture cards, which are physically smaller, but built expressly for cameras. Still, they don't come in capacities higher than 2GB, while SD cards can be found in capacities of 4GB.

That's probably the only downside to a camera that produced images that I liked. I'd easily pay $399 for it, which is the suggested retail price, but chances are you don't have to, as I found it listed online for as little as $299.

Hesseldahl is a reporter for BusinessWeek.com.