Fujifilm.

Personal Fujifilm DX-10 Camera Review.

This was my first ever digital camera a Fujifilm DX-10 and if my memory serves me correctly it was bought for me by family as a club together gift in 1999.
I should not really know this as it was a present but at the time it cost £250 and compared to digital cameras today was really basic.

It had no optical zoom but a 1.6 times digital zoom which only worked on the maximum setting (1024 pixels by 768 pixels) and all it really did was crop and enlarge the selected image part the result being a picture that was 640 pixels by 480 pixels and in truth you could do a better job with a decent bit of software.

It only came with a Smart Media card that was 2Mb in size, 16Mb was available as an extra purchase but cost £70, batteries were standard and took four AA size, (re-chargeable's were extra again costing silly money)!

It did come with AV leads and could be hooked up to a television and a reasonable slide show presentation could be had, it also came with some free editing software, Adobe Photoshop Deluxe 2 which at the time I thought was really great and simple to use (alas when I purchased a PC with Windows XP rather than Widows 98 it failed to run which was how I ended up with Paint Shop Pro 7 Anniversary Edition).

When it came to transferring pictures to the PC a RS-232 serial interface was the method of choice which was slow and also ran the risk of loosing data should the batteries conk out. To power the unit from mains would solve this problem but once again the power unit was extra and oddly enough cost £70, I overcame this buy buying a "Tandy" variable voltage transformer for £13 running on the 4.5 volt setting just to be safe and it worked fine.

Using the camera was really simple, the menu buttons seemed to be logically placed and it was literally a point and shot camera, the macro mode was pretty good as well and you could get pretty close to the subject before it went out of focus, (about 10cm or 4 inches).

The built in flash had a range of about 3 meters, (10 feet) but really drained standard batteries so it was best to use re-chargeable NiMH, (Nickel Metal Hydride) batteries if you could afford them. The higher the number on the battery, (usually around 1300 Milliamp/Hour at the time) the better but the better they were the higher the cost. Nicd (Nickel Cadmium) were a waste of time and tended to suffer memory loss when it came to recharging them anyway.

The camera had quite a lot of features that you find in most cameras today things like White Balance correction, EV Correction, various flash modes, a close up Macro setting and a few other manually adjustable settings, picture quality for example.

Night shots were a bit hit and miss as there was no way of manually focusing on a subject in the dark so you had to rely on the cameras range, (0.7 meters (28 inches) to Infinity) to capture an image within the flash range, I never tried using the close up feature in the dark but I guess the same problem would present itself.

For all it's lack of technology compared to today's cameras I thought this camera was great, the pictures it took were perfectly good enough for a 6" by 4" print, (if it was used at the best setting) and apart from some of the night shots the images were fairly well defined for a camera that was only 0.8 Megapixels. The LCD screen was quite clear except in really bright conditions but the optical viewer was always available as an alternative for framing the image as long as you were not to close to the subject.

For my first ever digital camera and compared to some of the competition cameras at the time I can honestly say I was very impressed and glad that it was the camera that my family chose to buy me as a present.
Unfortunately the Smart Media cards are very expensive now as it was a format that was dropped by Fuji and replaced by the xD card instead, that said the camera still works and still takes a fair picture today.

Included in the Kit:

Bought As Extras: