Fujifilm FinePix S5700

A few years back the market was flooded with a particular superzoom camera that everyone wanted to get their hands on - the Fujifilm FinePix S5300. It offered excellent performance at a very attractive price, which was a hard to match combination. Years later Fujifilm has just launched its latest in the series, the S5700, and this time, we at Tech2 will personally check out what the hype is all about.

Build
What impressed me immediately about the S5700 is how light it was. Considering it’s pumped with 4 AA batteries, I expected it to weigh a lot more than just 406 grams. It isn’t too bulky either for a superzoom, at its dimensions of 106 x 76 x 81 mm.

It has an amazingly deep hand-grip on the right, which makes it very easy to hold for an adult male hand. With all the functions located on the right, it’s easy to operate with a single hand.

The back of the camera has a 2.5" LCD display with a resolution of 230,000 pixels. Unfortunately it doesn’t have any tilt or swivel function to make its functionality a lot easier, like in a lot of superzoom models these days.

Most of the basic functions can be accessed at the back of the S5700, with other functions like zoom, power, mode dial and shutter release located on the top of the camera. It supports xD picture cards as well as SD cards.

Overall, I quite like the design of the S5700. It’s built well, it’s friendly and it’s comfortable — a combination that rarely misses.
__PAGEBREAK__
Functionality
7.1 megapixels at its disposal may not sound too hardcore, considering the amount of 10 megapixel cameras we’ve been getting our hands on lately, but rest assured, it’s more than enough to even get an A3 page sized print of your photos.

It has 10x optical zoom which is equivalent to 38mm-380mm. Though I would have appreciated this a lot more if it had optical image stabilization to go with this level of zoom, but alas, that isn’t so. Only digital image stabilization here, and thankfully it’s activated only through a special mode, so you can make sure that you don’t accidentally use it and affect the quality of your shots.

Being in a superzoom category, we naturally expect a range of manual features to offer users total control of their compositions. The good thing is that the S5700 is completely customizable, with manual exposure, white balance and manual focus. The manual focus however in not very effective and to an extent, even painful to execute. However, the auto-focus mode works very well, so focusing manually wouldn’t be too high on your demands.

__PAGEBREAK__
Performance
Starting from image sharpness, the S5700 proved to be well more than its money’s worth in this category. In just about every lighting condition, even while using the camera’s scene mode, the images came out pretty sharp and noise free.

The colors were slightly saturated (as expected), even in the natural color tone setting, but that’s usually appreciated by casual users. That said, the camera handled all the reds, greens, and blues pretty well.

The camera’s night mode uses a slower shutter speed once the flash is turned off, instead of just pumping up the ISO sensitivity, which is just the way I like it. This way you get much sharper night shots with minimal noise.

The S5700 takes around 4 seconds to power up and close to 2.5 seconds between consecutive shots without flash. Needless to say, speed is not the biggest selling point for this camera.

I particularly love the low battery consumption of this camera. The four AA Energizer batteries that came bundled with the camera absolutely refused to die even after 150 shots plus videos.
__PAGEBREAK__
Conclusion
The best thing about the Fujifilm FinePix S5700 is its price point of Rs. 12,990, making it undoubtedly an excellent deal. Sure there are a couple of shortcomings in the camera, but they take little away from the fact that it is an excellent performer anyway you look at it.

It has the build and it gives the results. If it’s a budget superzoom camera you want, look nowhere else.