Fujifilm Finepix S9500 Zoom

The Finepix S9500 Zoom looks and feels like a digital SLR, but has many features of a high-end digital compact camera.

With sales of digital SLRs increasing, it might seem odd for Fujifilm to release a camera such as the S9500. It has no through-the-lens viewfinder and doesn’t support interchangeable lenses, yet it’s only very slightly smaller than Nikon’s popular D50 digital SLR.

The images it produces, however, are far from tiny. With an effective 9megapixel sensor the S9500 Zoom has one of the highest pixel resolutions available in this price bracket.

We were very impressed with the image quality, which under good lighting conditions was comparable to budget SLR performance.

While SLR purists will take some convincing, the use of an LCD viewfinder and tilting screen allows shooting from trickier angles and makes features such as video recording and a live histogram possible.

Although the lens is fixed to the camera, it offers a 10x optical zoom. You also get a manual zoom control and focus rings. Video can be recorded at 30fps (frames per second) in VGA (640 x 480) resolution and is streamed to either XD Picture Card or Compact Flash.

As a hybrid product, the S9500 Zoom has to appeal not only to potential purchasers of digital SLRs, but also to those who are looking at high-end compact models.

The software is more suited to the latter. Features such as automatic downloading of images from the camera and basic image enhancement are undoubtedly useful, but any manipulation of raw images is omitted. Even basic adjustment features are not available in raw mode.

Excellent image quality and SLR-like handling means the S9500 Zoom will be attractive to those who want advanced features, but don’t want to spend money on a full SLR kit.