Thought you guys & gals would like to know what I think of the S1600 as I can't find any expert reviews on the web yet.  By the way, I live in Norwich "A Fine City"

The new Finepix S1600 was chosen by me as I was impressed by my daughter's colourful pictures taken on her Finepix J60 (now discontinued). I also wanted a bit more than a simple "point & shoot" camera. (I have two of these already) In the "olden days" (at least that's what my grandaughter calls them. She also thought the whole world was black & white then too!) I used to use a Nikon 35mm film camera and I wanted to have some flexibility in shooting, hence my choice of the S1600 without the expense of a DSLR.

Anyway, here are some shots taken recently with some of my thoughts

This is Bishop Bridge (One of the oldest bridges in England still in use today)

Taken in April.  This shows what a superb lens this camera has. There is virtually no purple fringing even when zooming in to the edge of the picture where the roof meets the bright sky.  Many more expensive cameras exhibit this bad characteristic.

Next is a shot of The Cow Tower.  I hope you can see the excellent resolution of the lens even in this scaled pic. Picked out the bricks beautifully when zoomed on the computer.

Next, I wanted to see how the camera dealt with extreme lighting when pointed at the sun.  As you can see, there is no coloured streaking from the sun itself and there is still some detail in the grass and lampost.  I was particularly impressed with the reflection in the puddle!

Night shot.  Pulls Ferry.  Although only lit from the front, right, there is plenty of detail shown throughout the whole shot.  I thought that the bush to the left of the arch would not show up at all.  I used the "tripod night" setting for this one at 200 ISO. (the camera resolved this to 3sec @f4.2)

I turned the camera 90 degrees on the tripod for this next shot. You can see Bishop Bridge in the distance.  I am still not sure what white balance to use for this street lighting. Same ISO 200, but only 2 secs for this exposure.  Just looked at this shot and thought there was some noise in the dark regions, but no! I just needed to clean my glasses!!!)

Another low light shot.  This time inside Norwich castle during the day.  This time ISO 800 this time 1/5 sec @ f3.1.  This was a hand held shot and I stood remarkably still with my breath held for this one, but the dual IS Mode stabilisation worked very well, but did increase the ISO.  Quite a good shot but would have been a lot better using a tripod and a lower ISO.

And now, Macro Mode.  You may have seen my bent candle shot in my Gallery, but here is the original with some simple cropping.

I did clear the background in Photoshop CS4 for this one.  The sax player is 2" high.  I've eaten the grapes!

The following 3 shots were shot in macro mode with no flash.

And now just for fun a couple of shots taken recently at The Parrot Zoo.  This is near Friskney between Boston and Skegness, Lincs.  I haven't laughed so much in ages. Apart from all their talking and opera singing,  there are some great photo opportunities there, and is a great place to visit especially with the children.

Yer 'avvin' a laugh!  He wanted the camera, but I wouldn't let him have it!

Not technically a great shot, but when I took this I had parrots all over me!

You can look at the specs. or see the Fuji Guys on YouTube to see just what the S1600 camera will do.  I have been very pleased with it so far. The zoom lens is fantastic (I've included 2 shots below so you see how far it will zoom.  The Macro is great.  The intelligent flash works faultlessly although I notice I haven't included any shots here. I tend not to use the auto scene recognition setting, but is quite useful for test shots when viewing exif and histogram details on the camera display.  A good starting point anyway.

Do I have any criticisms?  Well yes,  I would have liked to see a greater range of aperture settings on manual mode for those depth of field shots.  I would also like to be able to set focus manually to infinity.  This is because I tried to take some moon shots, but couldn't quite get in focus. Mind you it was a bit hazy and may have been fooling with the AF or maybe I just haven't found out how to do it yet. Also you cannot attach filters to the lens. It would interfere with the lens retraction when switching off.  Also, the lens cap falls off quite easily. It is attached to the lanyard as suggested by Fuji.  However, because it is not a tight fit, if you switch the camera on and forget to take the cap off it pushes it off quite easily anyway.  Seems a strange way to go about things though.  Would I buy another S1600 if mine was stolen or lost?  Yes definitely yes. For the money I don't think it can be beaten.   Anyway thanks for reading.  Any comments would be welcome.   Here follows the 2 shots mentioned earlier.

Oh! I nearly forgot,  The panorama stitching in the camera is great and easy to do as well. Can you spot the joins? By the way, I didn't buy the camera from Argos.  I took this the first day I had the camera.