I compared features, picture quality, ease of use and the end result...great pictures when I printed them out! There is a lot of competition, like the Casio, Sony, Canon, Pentax and Olympus point and shoot cameras...but for the price and what this camera is capable of...with 12.1 megapixles, a 5X optical zoom, wide angle lens, as well as the quality of the Fuji F100fd and the ease of producing truely stunning pics, this is the best DigiCam available.

It quickly "boots up" from startup, and is ready to take pics within a second! The camera does all the work, as a good "point and shoot" is supposed to do. And yet, study the owners manual to really get the full capability of this camera. Portraits can be taken in soft, natural lighting, with the camera capable of extreme low light photos, (12,800 iso!)with great color and exposure. The face detection technology will focus and frame up to 10 faces in a group shot, assuring good exposure on each person. Dual image stabilization keeps the camera induced shaking to a minimum, 5 frames per second! The CCD is FujiFilms 10th generation Supper CCD that allows deep layers of color unlike other cameras, and makes the pictures more like an actual "film" type camera.

A newbie to camera's will find that they can easily produce pictures that will equal the professional photographers best efforts!

I am an SLR guy, with a lot of photography experience. I retired recently from 25 years with a SoCal Police agency, where I had plenty of opportunities to use a camera(s) in the performance of my duties. I started with a Konica camera, 35MM film, and moved up to more and less sophisiticated cameras over the years. I finally settled on the FujiFilm FinePix brand, because the value to price was always there, lots of features for the money and great picture quality. Also the overall "right out of the box" ease of use was impressive, as was the way the camera's seemed to hold up, even when handled rather roughly! When it was time to retire, my buddy bought me a new FujiFilm F100fd, andI have to say this is the best I've owned yet! You would have a hard time trying to take a bad picture with this camera! Colors are perfect, the focusing power and the rapid shutter speed, as well as the capability to take pics without (virtually) ever having to use the flash, is incredible. Portrait quality faces, clear colors...terrific! I can hardly wait till we take our RV out camping and get to try out this camera in the great outdoors, like Yosemite and the North Rim of the Grand Canyon in the winter! 5 Star and 2 thumbs up for this gem!

This camera is way underrated in this forum. Being a Coolpix 3100 user for several years I took top of the line Coolpix S600 and was rather disappointed with it - lots of chromatic aberrations, image noise, inability to shoot in the dark, etc. I also tried top-scored (in this forum) Canon 790 IS and had to return it either. Canon is a good camera, but only during the day. Finepix 100fd has excellent image quality during any time of the day! Colors are beautiful and natural as well. And I strongly agree with Alan (see post as of 6/12/08) - some pictures are like a work of art, you just want to look and look at them. I could never expect this kind of photographs from such a small camera. In addition it boosts 5x wide-angle optical zoom. There is no match to this camera in its class. I do have this pink effect on an LCD screen, but it happens very rarely, but most of all, do I care about it if image quality is perfect - not at all.

I am a professional photographer by occupation so when it comes to buying a compact for myself I am very picky. I use a Sinar digital studio camera and a Canon eos 1ds at work so I find it hard to accept a massive drop in quality with my compact. You have to accept that a small sensor with a huge number of pixels is going to mean images wont be as "clean" as pro cameras but this little Fuji strikes the perfect balance between quality, size and ease of use. What I (and most people) want from a compact camera is a small, easy to use, fun product which is capable of turning out good quality images and has a scope for a little bit of experimentation. The F100fd is small enough to take anywhere in a pocket. This is my biggest criticism of many digital compacts. It doesn't matter how many more features your camera might have, or how impressive the lens looks if you can't be bothered to take it with you when a photo opportunity presents itself. I'll have my little Fuji while your camera is gathering dust in a drawer at home. I nearly bought a Canon G9 after using a friends. It really is a lovely camera and has loads of manual control available but in the end it isn't small enough to comfortably put in a pocket and the image quality wasn't visually superior. The Fuji is great at balancing flash and available light. Colour and contrast are very natural and it even has a reasonable movie mode. The face detection mode really works and is very useful and the Enhanced portrait mode is a nice touch. You really will make your friends happy when they see what this does for them. It's a little "Hollywood" to use all the time but it really does give the Airbrushed flawless skin effect without having to faff around in Photoshop. Most compacts are used as party cameras in low light conditions. The Fuji is perfect as it seems to have a better high ISO performance than other compacts, the flash/ambient light balance is excellent and the enhanced portrait mode really flatters. When pushed it can get a little more serious and turn out proper images which to my eye are superb (even compared to my work cameras) It might not look as sexy as other comapcts (eg the Panasonic Lumix range) or be as "Hands On" as something like a Canon G9 but I would recommend the Fuji to anyone.