Face recognition is the new feature this camera possesses that Fujifilm hopes will have people flocking to buy its Finepix S6500fd.

This a hybrid camera, larger than a digital compact and shaped like a SLR, but without the through-the-lens preview and lens changing ability of an SLR. It's aimed at people looking to make the step up from a compact, but who aren't sure that the 'professional' SLRs are for them.

The Fujifilm Finepix S6500fd is quite a bit smaller than the average SLR, and it's also very light. That gives it a slightly cheap plastic feel, but that soon passes with use.

It's easy to get to grips with– as simple as a compact, in fact – you can just pick it up, switch it on, and it's ready to shoot. The menus are easy to follow and clear. There are several shooting modes available on a dial, from full manual to fully automatic, as well as landscape, portrait and night modes, among others.

The face-recognition mode works reasonably well, picking up and auto-focusing on one or many faces in a scene, but subjects need to be open-faced towards the camera, and even with slightly covered faces, the camera can't recognise people.

The supplied software can pick out faces and create slideshows of them (from pictures taken when face-detection is switched on). It's a clever feature, but it needs a bit of tweaking to be of use.

Instead of zoom buttons the user has to twist a ring on the lens to zoom in and out. It's also possible to focus manually using another ring on the lens, but the S6500fd uses a slightly odd screen-based focusing method, which doesn't feel intuitive and isn't easy to use.

The autofocus mode is fine and fast, but we experienced a few problems attempting to focus on close, zoomed-in objects, which the camera refused to do. The lens is also noisy, with the motors whirring slightly whenever it's in use. Neither of these are big problems, but they could be annoying.

There is a viewfinder, but since this isn't an SLR it simply offers the same view as the screen, rather than direct through the lens. Again, this isn't a major problem, but it means you can't switch the screen off to save battery power. That said, it uses four AA batteries rather than a battery pack, which will suit some photographers.

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Pentax K100D
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