Home > Consumer Reviews > Fuji FinePix F601Z Digital Camera [3.1MP 3.0xOptical]

I've had the camera 2 weeks and used it in very bright sunshine and at night on the London Eye taking shots of the Houses of Parliament and the Thames. The results were uniformly excellent, far exceeding my expectations of a digital camera. It's small enough to take virtually anywhere but good enough to make very large prints without losing quality. I took a beautiful London night sky shot on the 6 million pixel setting and printed it on A3 photo paper. The image produced is stunning. I have no complaints at all bar the standard memory of the card - my advice would be to get two 128mb cards so you'll never be caught short. The docking cradle makes transferring pictures easy and the Adobe software in the bundle is excellent. My Canon 35 mil SLR may go into permanent retirement.

The fuji finepix f601 is a very practical take anywhere digital camera having had mine for about a week and not knowing anything about digital camera`s i found it very easy to navigate around.if you just want to use it in the auto mode just point and shoot,or if you want to be the next david bailey in the manual setup it delivers excellent pictures every time. the video and sound is excellent too if you want to veiw on your pc or the lcd screen.
the only draw back i would say is fuji are tight with just giving you a 16mb smartmedia memory,apart from this i am extremely happy with mine just pop it in your pocket and go anywhere it`s so small excellent.

I was looking for a replacement for my compact SLR and chose the 601. Its small size means you really can take it anywhere and hardly notice you're carrying it. The quality of the pictures is superb. I use the 3MP setting, which produces great looking prints on A4.

The docking cradle and software make downloading pictures and charging the battery a dream, especially as I used to have a camera that took rechargable AA cells - what a pain that was.

Don't worry about the controls, I've got quite large hands but I find the "joystick" control no problem.

Three things I would improve are:

1. The LCD is small, which means that you really have to zoom in to check your pictures.
2. The menus take a lot of getting used to and you could easily miss a great shot whilst trying to get the camera into the right mode.
3. You have to use the cradle to display the pictures on TV. This can be a bit of a pain if you want to show your shots to a few people, especially if you're not at home. A "slide show" mode would have been good.

I'd recommend this camera but you'll need to buy a bigger memory card unless you take all your pictures on a low quality setting (in which case you should buy a cheaper camera!)

Also have a look at the Cannon S30 and S40.

When researching my first digicam,only two met all my specs - this and the Nikon CP4300.I handled both,but was seduced by the tough alloy body,style,compactness and video/audio capability of this little Fuji. Offering Auto,Scenes,AP,SP and full Manual control,it delivers perfect shots time after time.I always shoot at 3mp fine - I have never used the 6mp setting;you have to remember that bigger files take longer to load and use up more file space.I have successfully printed up to about A4 size.In short a great camera to travel with - but buy a 128mb card and a spare battery,then you can shoot 100 or so photos without removing the card at all.Back home,transfer of images to PC is a doddle using the docking station,and Finepix viewer is easy to use.There simply aren't many cameras in the sub-£300 bracket which can do what the F601z can.Sadly it is now discontinued!

This is a really stilish and nice little machine hiding a very powerful photo camera. It can both take pictures in "auto" mode (so you do not have to care about focus, ISO, etc) or manual mode. The quality of the images is really good. It is easy to manage and very user friendly. The only problem is that the 16MB card is not really enough if you are interestig in taking good quality pictures for future printing