Digital SLR Camera

By Richard Butler and Simon Joinson at DPreview

Having recently taken its long zoom cameras into ever more DSLR-like territory, Fuji’s S8000fd is something of a departure. The S8000fd places a smaller sensor behind a much longer-range zoom lens in a less SLR-like body. Going head to head with the Panasonic FZ18 and Olympus SP560UZ the S8000fd is Fuji’s most ambitious zoom compact to date. It is also the first long-zoom camera from Fuji to offer image stabilization (in this case a CCD-shake system), which is offered by most competing brands and is pretty much essential with a zoom this long.

The S8000fd packs an awful lot into its compact body, and seems to be trying pretty hard to be all things to all people, with manual exposure controls sitting alongside point-and-shoot convenience features such as face detection. There is a high-speed shooting mode (at reduced resolution), and some extremely high sensitivity modes (again at lower resolution), for shooting in low light. What compromises this all-encompassing approach brings, we shall see.

Headline features

• 18X optical zoom, giving a 27mm-486mm equiv. range
• Dual IS, combining sensor shift technology with high ISO settings
• 8.0 million pixel sensor
• ISO 6400 at 4MP
• ISO 1600 at full resolution
• Face detection (up to 10 faces per shot)
• Face detection-combined In-camera red-eye reduction
• High-speed focus mode
• Rapid continuous shooting (up to 15fps at 2MP)
• 60 fps LCD refresh rate
• Accepts both xD and SD cards, including SDHC