Fujifilm FinePix J30 Digital Camera – Silver 2.7 inch LCD

Mrs. Jl Purser

at 1:17 am

I bought this after we had purchased several for the school, and I’d seen how easy to use they were and what good picture quality they had. The set up is easy, and the general functions are quick to navigate around. I took some lovely snow pictures this week, and it shoots excellent quality video. My one concern is that the battery cover comes undone far too easily, as it tends to be where you put your right thumb while taking a picture. Apart from that, a good camera.
Rating: 4 / 5

Avening-Lady

at 3:37 am

Neat little camera.Size of a mobile phone.Many extra features normally found in a much more expensive camera.Great little camera at a fantastic price.My son loves it.Highly recommended.
Rating: 5 / 5

T. Bradley

at 6:28 am

Got one of these for xmas after a long time waiting to upgrade my ancient but still excellent Finepix 2600z (2MP). I wasn’t really interested in another brand as I’ve been so happy with my old camera for a number of years, bulky though it is/was.

This camera is a great size, slim and small and fits in the hand nicely as well as slipping into a pocket easily. The LCD screen however is lovely and large and easy to see in almost any light. There’s no viewfinder like on my old camera but with a screen like this it’s certainly not needed. Happily I got a 4GB memory card with it as the internal memory won’t hold more than a few photos.

Most importantly it takes beautiful pictures; crisp, clear and very high quality, even on lower settings.

There are loads of settings and options on the camera depending on where you’re taking photos and what the subject is. Despite that it’s really easy to use and very intuitive. Although I probably won’t use many of the settings they’re simple to find if I do. I pretty much figured most of it out very quickly without even consulting the manual.

Ah yes, the manual. Some people of course never bother reading the manual. I do and was a bit miffed that it was included only on a cd, meaning I had to use my computer to read it. Not helpful if you happen to be away from home and without computer access. On the plus side though the manual is very clearly written and easy to follow should you need it. Kind of hard to take it with you when you’re out for the day and want to check how to take that particular shot. Maybe I’m being pedantic though because as I said the camera is so easy, you really shouldn’t need to consult the manual once you’ve read it through once.

Now the big let down: the software. I installed it, I tried it, I tried it again, and again… and finally uninstalled it, put the disc in the empty box and chucked it out. It’s rubbish. The software I had with my old Fuji Finepix was brilliant. I could choose to save my pics with the DSCF00001 type filename OR named by date & time (2009_1225_135402AA) which I find more useful. It let me see a full screen of images so I could choose which I wanted, which I didn’t and I could delete, rotate, save etc the pics I wanted before saving to my PC. The NEW version has no choice of how to name your files and only seems to display 4-5 pics at once before you save them to PC, no folder or album view. It does have some nice editing options but I have far better image processing software on my PC anyway (Photoshop, ACDSEE, Adobe Bridge, Irfanview, Faststone etc). All the things I liked about the old software has been left off this version. That wouldn’t be so bad if the new version actually did what it was supposed to do but it’s not only cumbersome and awkward but very, very unresponsive and it crashed several times while I was trying to find options that I was convinced I must be overlooking, but are simply not available. The old version of the software won’t recognise the new camera.

Every one of the other Imaging softwares I mentioned above do a far better job of importing, sorting, saving, naming, editing and displaying your photos better than this pathetic excuse for software.

Conclusion: The camera is excellent, it’d be hard to get anything better anywhere near this price range, but I’d advise anyone to use different software when it comes to uploading & editing your pics. I recommend Faststone, it’s free and does a great job.
Rating: 5 / 5