I have purchased the Fuji FinePix A345 4.1-Megapixel digital camera for $137. This is a rather low price for a 4.1-Megapixel digital camera with 3x optical zoom and a 1.7-inch LCD screen. Do you get what you pay for? Let's find out.

Pictures

The pictures of the Fuji FinePix A345 as well as sample photos I took using it are available at the address below:

Click here to see the sample photos I took with this Fuji FinePix A345 camera and photos of the camera

What Is Fuji FinePix A345?

The Fuji FinePix A345 is an inexpensive 4.1-Megapixel digital camera with 3x optical zoom (38-114 mm equivalent), 1.7-inch LCD screen, optical zooming viewfinder, USB and A/V connections. The A345 is PictBridge compliant and can be used to print directly without a computer.

The camera uses 2 AA batteries (disposable batteries included), has a flash with red-eye reduction function and uses xD-Picture memory cards (16 MB card included). The camera also has a movie mode with sound (320x240 or 160x120 at 15 fps).

Getting Started

Once I opened the box, I was surprised how nice the camera looked for its price. The front of it has nice chrome accents and the lens is nicely retracted flush with the camera body.

The camera is rather compact and fits in a pant pocket or a purse. It is made of light plastic and feels sturdy, but not overly so. Controls have decent feel to them, aside from the zoom control, which makes slight creaking sounds when twisted.

The camera has a battery and memory compartment lid at its bottom. The markings are not well visible, so you have to peek inside the battery compartment to see the required load polarity. Once I loaded the batteries (1600 mAh NiMH Panasonic batteries) and the supplied 16 MB xD-picture memory card, I was ready to shoot.

Camera Controls

The camera has a power button and a shutter release button on the top deck. If you depress and hold the power button, the lens extends, the lens lid opens and the LCD illuminates, at which point you are ready to shoot. It takes between 3 and 4 seconds for the camera to power up. Strangely, it takes sometimes less and sometimes more time.

To turn the camera off, you do the same - depress and hold the button. The lens retracts and the lid closes, protecting the lens. It takes a couple of seconds.

The back of the camera houses a 1.7-inch LCD screen, an optical viewfinder, a sliding switch between review, video and photo modes, four buttons and a zoom control.

The zoom control is an unusual one. It is a little joystick-like control that can be twisted/shifted up or down. You push it up to zoom in or down to zoom out. You also use it to control menus (to move up or down within them).

The side of the camera has a USB port, an A/V port and a DC power port. All ports are exposed and have no lid over them.

Operation

Once the camera is powered on, you can take pictures. The viewfinder and the LCD have a clearly defined central area where the camera focuses. You point that area on the subject you want the camera to focus on and depress the shutter release button halfway. The camera focuses and beeps. Then you can re-point (recompose) the camera while still keeping the shutter release button depressed halfway and then push the button all the way to make the camera take a picture.

The camera focuses rather quickly. Indoors, in electric light, it focused consistently faster than an expensive Sony DSC-H1 (about 1-2 seconds versus 3 seconds). But the camera has no focus assist light and sometimes (in dimly-lit environments) cannot focus at all.

The shutter lag is less than a second (when pre-focused).

The camera has an easy-to-use menu system and lets you select resolution (4M 2304x1728 Fine or Normal setting, 3:2 2304x1536 for perfect fit for 6x4 prints, 2M 1600x1200, 1M 1280x960 and 0.3M 640x480), shooting mode (Auto, Manual, Landscape, Portrait, etc.), ISO (Auto, 80, 100, 200, 400), white balance, timer and more.

I have not read the manual but was able to operate the camera and all its functions easily. The problem with the camera's menus is that you have to use the zoom control to navigate them as the proper menu control buttons were removed to reduce costs. So you have to use the zoom control to move up or down and the buttons on the left or right of it (macro and flash mode control) to move left and right. It feels pretty awkward.

The camera has a decent flash with a red-eye reduction mode that worked well. The flash reaches as far as 11-12 feet, a rather good performance.

I have not tried the camera's macro capability. But the camera has a fixed aperture (f/2.8 at wide angle, f/4.7 at full telephoto). The camera does not show you the shutter speed or the aperture in shooting or review mode, so you have no idea what will be blurry and what will not.

By looking at the EXIF information, I noticed that the camera only has one aperture value per focal length, which means you will not get the pictures that are sharp from foreground to background even in Landscape mode in bright light.

The manual mode is not really a manual mode but rather a programmed exposure mode with exposure adjustment in 1/3 EV steps.

The camera lacks buttons and to delete a photo in review mode you have to call up a menu and select the command to erase a photo. Worse yet, once the photo is deleted, the camera asks you if you want to delete the next photo with default answer being push OK to delete. Since the menu is called by the OK/Menu button, you tend to intuitively try to push it to get out of the delete mode. But that does the opposite and deletes your picture. I have deleted several pictures this way by mistake.

LCD

The LCD was fluid, informative and bright enough in perfect light. It offers precise 100% coverage. But in dark environments it was too dark and even in moderate sunlight I couldn't see much despite increasing the LCD brightness. You have to use the viewfinder (which is bright, but a bit too tight).

Picture Quality

You can see a sample photo I took using the Fuji A345 below (click it for full-sized view):

The A345 produces pictures that feature highly saturated but film-like colors. I like the fact that the colors are film-like, but the saturation may be too much for some people (myself included). Since the camera uses a fixed (rather fast) aperture, the pictures are sharp mostly at the distances where you focus, but not elsewhere. You cannot have both sharp foreground and background, even in bright daylight in the Landscape mode.

Worse, if you expect sharp pictures because this camera has 4.1-Megapixel resolution, think again. The pictures I took were reasonably sharp when printed at small sizes (6x4), but if you print them larger or look at them on the computer screen at their actual size (pixel per pixel), you see that the pictures are not as sharp as you can get from most other 4MP cameras.

I am not sure what is to blame here, the lens or the aggressive image noise suppression, but the fact is this camera produces images that should probably not be enlarged more than 5x7, despite their resolution.

The noise is well controlled overall. And the camera is well suited for taking portrait pictures, especially considering its large apertures.

The images were generally free of distortions and I noticed no chromatic aberration (purple fringing) to speak of. But the corners of the picure were blurrier than the center.

Computer Connectivity

I could use a USB cable that came with my Philips MP3 player as I was too lazy to get the USB cable that came with this camera out of the box. It worked well. I didn't need to install any drivers on my Windows 2000 SP4 machine and I could copy files at about 600-700 KB/s, which is about average performance. You can use a card reader that supports xD cards as well.

Bottom Line

Although the Fuji FinePix A345 is inexpensive, feature-rich and easy to use, I cannot recommend it. The large display and 4.1-Megapixel resolution cannot compensate for the fact that it produces photos that are soft-looking above 5x7 print size and uses fixed aperture and inconvenient menu controls. But if you don't plan to print anything larger than 5x7, it might be a good choice.

If you can spend $20-60 more, you will have a lot of much better choices. Just to name a few: Sony DSC-S40, Olympus D-595, Canon A520, Panasonic LZ1.

Recommended
No

Product Rating
(Average)

This review is also available at Epinions.com: Fuji FinePix A345 Digital Camera Review on Epinions.com

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