The F100fd ushers in yet another new generation of Fujifilm's Super CCD HR sensor, now in its eighth incarnation.

This is backed up by Fujifilm's latest RPT (Real Photo Technology), a system that tweaks settings automatically to give you natural-looking digital images 'as the human eye sees them'.

Detailed photos

Photographing people is simplified with new, improved Face Detection 3.0, which detects up to ten faces in a scene and adjusts focus accordingly, all in the blink of an eye.

Further luxury comes in the form of two Portrait modes (one to additionally smooth out wrinkles and blemishes), and there are facilities to remove red-eye at the reviewing stage or as you shoot, in which case both the original and the corrected versions are saved to the memory card.

Throughout our tests, images were remarkably noise-free all the way up to ISO 800 and still only moderate at ISO 1600, although some fine detail was progressively lost as we went up the sensitivity scale, suggesting that the smoothing section of the camera's image-processing system was working overtime.

If you're willing to drop to 3MP image sizes, you can take the sensitivity all the way up to a staggering ISO 12800 but noise runs rampant as a result.

Streamlined features

Some old favourites from the F50fd have been retained, like the trick Natural Light mode for making the most of gloomy conditions without resorting to flash, as well as a Natural & Flash mode, which takes two shots in quick succession, delivering flash and non-flash images.

Sadly, other features have been dropped. For example, there's no separate mode dial, so you have to access all the shooting and scene modes through the four-way thumb pad and menu button, which can be a bit of a time-waster. Aperture Priority and Shutter Priority modes have been stripped out altogether.

As with so many compact cameras, the so-called Manual mode gives no control over aperture or shutter speed, in this case merely allowing access to somewhat fundamental photographic choices like alternative metering and autofocus modes, white balance settings and exposure compensation.

What's a real pain is that these basic controls aren't available in other shooting and scene modes. For example, why shouldn't you be able to apply exposure bias while also making use of Portrait mode for improved skin tones?

Sharp lens

Getting back to the good stuff, one excellent new addition is the Dynamic Range function.